The Sword of Stone
by Ser Serendipity
Summary: A Not Sick Sidestory. With the destruction of Akatsuki, the fragile balance of the world's peace has slowly begun to tip. Now, with the Five Villages drawing closer to conflict, shinobi young and old have no choice but to understand their place: whether as people, soldiers, or mere tools.
1. Tamako Shirogane

The Sword of Stone Chapter 1

First Steps  


"Tamako?"

Tamako Shirogane looked up from the needle in her arm. The old man sitting opposite her, his hand comfortably resting on her unpunctured forearm, gave her a smile. It was as warm as his hand, which gave her a companionable squeeze.

"It doesn't hurt too much, does it?" he said, the kind voice of a fellow conspirator, and Tamako couldn't help but smile back. It was a warm day outside, and a little sunlight filtered in through the wide windows dominating one wall of the white office, along with the extremely muted sound of people coming and going several stories below. The room itself was rather spartan: there was a desk in the far corner with a mirror hanging above it, the spindly chair Tamako was resting in, and a variety of charts and lists she hadn't bothered to read hung on the wall behind her. Past the wide windows, the Tsuchikage's tower rose over the rest of the village in the distance, its coned roof looking for all the world like a Kage's hat cast in stone.

"No," Tamako shook her head. She almost expected her hair to swing a little with the motion, until she remembered she'd cut it short just two days before: now it was hardly two finger lengths long, bristly and black. "It's fine. I'm just…" She glanced down at her arm, and then out the window, wincing.

"Ah," the doctor said. He'd introduced himself as Jirou: Tamako hadn't caught his family name. "Needles?"

Tamako nodded, and the man chuckled. "Well, that's unusual, but I've seen it before." He grinned again, white teeth in a sagging face. "You shinobi are strange: you've been handling knives since you were five and you're afraid of a little prick?"

"Well, I'd do my best not to be stabbed with a knife either," Tamako replied in a strained voice, and the man huffed. Despite the sound, his eyes were still warm.

"'Stabbed.' Never had your blood drawn?" he asked, and Tamako shook her head again.

"I have," she said, trying to smile. "It's just not any easier, you know?"

Jirou nodded, looking serious. "Well, it won't be much longer," he reassured her. "Just another minute or so, and we'll have everything we'll need." He sat back, his hand still on her arm, and nodded at her forehead. "When did you graduate?"

Tamako's hitai-ate was still new. It gleamed under the fluorescent lights, unvarnished steel held in soft black cloth. The fabric blended in with her hair, creating the momentary illusion that the symbol of Iwagakure, two rough stones side by side, was affixed to her forehead by nothing. She'd admired the effect in the mirror earlier that day, and immediately felt unreasonably vain for doing so.

"Only two months ago." Tamako shifted in her chair, wincing. "Well, in a week it will be three, but I don't want to sound like some five year old demanding people say he's "five and half," you know?"

"Ha!" Jirou said, his face crinkling. "You shouldn't worry so much: you're a shinobi of the village now. There's no need to be concerned about what people think of you."

"I guess so," Tamako muttered.

"Was it difficult?" Jirou asked, and Tamako considered. "Graduating?"

"Well…" she hesitated, unable to help herself from watching more and more blood pumping out of her arm and into the bag hanging next to the bed. "It was easier than I thought it would be."

"I'm glad to hear that," Jirou said, moving forward. His fingers settled around the needle, and the flow of blood stopped. Carefully, he extracted it from her arm: Tamako felt the slightest twinge of pain and absence, a weight lifting, and then the procedure was over. "My grandson has been talking about joining the academy: he's much younger than you, but I think he already knows himself better than most." He looked Tamako in the eye, and she had to force herself not to look away, feeling a blush creep onto her face. "Someone like you could be an inspiration to him."

"Oh, but I'm really not…" she looked away, out the window, as Jirou packed up the needle and appraised the pack of her blood. " _Normal,_ you know?"

"Of course not," Jirou said, grinning at her once more. "You wouldn't be here if you were. But that doesn't change a thing."

Tamako tried to smile back, but it came out weak and insincere. Jirou didn't seem to care.

"Now!" he said, finally putting all of his equipment out of sight. He shuffled over to a nearby desk and rooted around in it, coming back with a small piece of tape and a puff of cotton. The cotton went over the puncture, and the tape over it. "We can get to the exciting stuff," the old man said as he patted Tamako's arm, ensuring the tape was tightly adhered.

" _Paperwork_." He turned away, striding with youthful energy. Tamako groaned and shuffled after him.

* * *

Tamako walked out of the hospital about twenty minutes later, her arm aching and a sweet stuffed in her mouth. She was probably too old for rock candies, but she'd been unable to resist nabbing one from the front desk on her way out. The nurse hadn't seemed to mind; just smiled and wished her a good day.

She wondered about that as she stepped out onto the wide stone bridge the connected the hospital to the rest of the village. There weren't many people milling about on it, and she barely paid attention to them as she walked forward, flexing her arm and trying to work the aches out of it.

Maybe it was the hitai-ate. Ever since she'd graduated, people had treated her differently. Shinobi hadn't just ignored her. Civilians had given her a little more respect than Tamako, frankly, thought she deserved.

It was weird to think like that. It hadn't been that long ago she'd been one of them, just another daughter of a merchant in Iwagakure, watching shinobi move around the village with supernatural grace with both awe and a little bit of jealousy. Things changed so fast.

Then again, she was only thirteen, wasn't she? She was probably too young to really have a reference for how fast things _could_ -

"Hey!"

Tamako bumped face-first into someone slightly taller than herself, stumbling backwards with an instinctive yelp. She caught herself before it turned into a stumble, but it was too late to save her pride. She felt her face go red, and bowed slightly, hiding it from whoever she'd almost bowled over.

"I'm so sorry!" she said, breathless with embarrassment. "I didn't-!"

"Jeez, Tamako," she recognized the voice, and immediately wished that she'd never left the hospital in the first place. "You don't gotta bow to me. That's just weird."

She looked up, her mouth a pursed line.

Takeshi Nadare blinked at her gormlessly, his wide, flat face infuriatingly cheerful. He was dressed in a simple Stone uniform, with his own twist put on it: a red t-shirt, flexible black pants, with a set of green bandages wrapped around his right arm, concealing everything from his bicep to his wrist with the exception of his elbow. His hitai-ate's cloth was a dull yellow, just like his eyes, and his hair was just as short and black as Tamako's.

He smiled at her, his whole face lighting up. It made him look slightly less dumb.

"Hey, you alright?" he said, pointing back over his shoulder with an extended thumb. "Sensei sent me to come get you."

"I'm fine!" she said, a bit too quickly. Takeshi didn't seem to notice. "Just… didn't see where I was going."

"Yeah, I figured." Takeshi cocked his head, considering the tape around her arm. "Your arm okay?" Tamako looked down at it and shrugged, begging herself to stop blushing.

"It's nothing, you know," she said. "They just had to draw a little blood."

"Oh, that's it?" Tamako flinched, and Takeshi grinned. "Cool," he said, turning half away. "C'mon, Sensei's been waiting. We got a mission to prep for, I guess."

Tamako stepped forward, curious. Just to her left, the edge of the bridge gave way to one of the several canyons running through Iwagakure. She could see a stream down there, and some dull-green shrubbery. It occurred to her she'd never bothered to explore those canyons, but doing so was completely within her ability.

Little things. If it weren't for her being different, she'd never have thought of them in the first place. It was strange to think about.

Tamako shook her head. "Right. What kind of mission?"

Takeshi shrugged. "I'unno. She never tells us anything." He turned his back on her and started to walk away, slowly picking up his pace. "C'mon!" he yelled back. "We gotta hurry!"

He was always too damn casual. It grated at Tamako as she chased after her teammate. Too many 'c'mons' and 'cools.' He needed to expand his vocabulary. And his damn flat face, always grinning. He looked like a cat that hadn't been clever enough to realize smashing its face into a window again and again would alter its features.

Then again, she considered, maybe the team needed someone who was relaxed. It certainly wasn't her.

They ended up meeting atop one one of the barracks, near the eastern edge of the Village. It was a building difficult to access even by the standards of a Village without conventional roads or streets. There were only two bridges that led to it, and both were usually subject to a decent amount of civilian traffic. Shinobi preferred to to get there by either moving up through the canyons, or traveling along the half-dozen power and communication lines that converged on it. Tamako hadn't thought running along a tightrope would be a very necessary skill when she'd been approached about becoming a shinobi, but the last five years had taught her otherwise. Traveling along those lines was one of the fastest ways around the Village.

The square roof of the barracks was capped with a sedimentary cap, smooth and dirty-yellow. The only other things of note on its concrete surface was a variety of relays and water-catchers, along with a small garden filled with tiny flowering trees with bright yellow fruits on the northern edge. It was slightly higher up in the ridges of the mountains that surrounded Iwagakure, and as such offered an impressive view of the rest of the village.

From up there it was easy to appreciate the scale of the village, and the intricacy of its construction. Hundreds and hundreds of cylinder-like buildings of incredibly disparate sizes, each capped with a different kind of colored stone to denote each structure, separated by roughly hewn canyons and connected by an endless series of stone bridges, metal catwalks, and thick, sturdy cables and pipes.

When Tamako and Takeshi arrived, their other teammate was already waiting for them, along with their sensei.

In many ways, Tamako's sensei frightened her.

She was an imposing woman, close to six feet tall. She always towered over her genin, and it was rarely a comforting feeling. She had sharp features: a chin like a razor, a small, angular nose, and perpetually suspicious coal-black eyes. Her hair was long and purple, always tied into a single enormous ponytail. Tamako had never summoned up the courage to ask whether it was dyed or not, but the one time Takeshi had their sensei had _sighed_ in such a manner that the innocent boy hadn't dared to speak the rest of the day.

So long as Tamako had known her, she'd always worn simple brown clothes: a collared shirt and grey pants. Over that, she often wore a flowing red jacket; it was asymmetrical, with one long arm-obscuring sleeve keeping company to an equally asymmetrical ankle-length skirt that concealed her left leg. Tamako had considered it unbelievably impractical when she'd first laid eyes upon the outfit. It was similar to the classic uniform of a Stone shinobi, but flashier and lengthier. But her sensei had never moved with anything but terrifying assurance and envious grace, so Tamako was forced to concede that while she found the long asymmetrical hem silly, it didn't seem to slow her teacher down.

Her name was Yui Tono, and Tamako was sure she had done much more exciting things than teach children before Tamako and her teammates had come along.

Tamako's other teammate was nothing like her sensei, or Takeshi. His name was Hideaki; Tamako had never learned his last name, despite some effort. He was rather squat, shorter than Tamako herself, and his face was marred by a constant frown. His brown hair was a constant tousled mess, and his equally brown eyes were always nervous, never daring to look at one thing at a time. Despite that, he was unfailingly polite, if a little distant.

"Tamako, Takeshi," Yui said, her lips curling. "Took you a while." Hideaki glanced at them, and then went back to analyzing the cloudy sky, his eyes zipping to one after another.

"Sorry sensei," Takeshi said, not really seeming sorry. "Tamako's appointment took longer than she thought it would."

Yui snorted. "They always seem to." She looked to Tamako. "Blood?"

"Yes, sensei." Tamako had difficulty maintaining eye contact with her teacher for long. "Just a little food, and I'll be fine."

"Hmm." Yui scratched her chin. "You're gonna have to hurry, then. We have to move out soon."

Tamako frowned. "Takeshi said we have a mission, but he had no idea what it was," she said, shooting her teammate a dark look. He returned a wide grin. "Are we leaving the village?"

"Just that," Yui nodded, and Tamako felt a flutter of excitement down in her gut. This would only be her third time out of Iwagakure, and the notion was still novel and a little frightening. "We're running supplies to a border outpost. Well," Yui flashed a grin, revealing some teeth, "a little beyond the border, actually. Nothing too intense, but it's time you saw what's out there." She brushed her sleeve. "Pack light, cause you're gonna be hauling a lot of crap. Trip'll probably be… two days, maybe a bit longer if you're lazy."

"Sensei." Hideaki finally spoke up. "That won't really be necessary, will it? Can't you just…?"

Yui narrowed her eyes. "I don't use my seals on just anything," she said, a little imperiously. "Besides, you guys need the exercise." She kicked vaguely in Hideaki's direction. "Especially you, shorty."

Hideaki grumbled, and Tamako held back a grin. Their sensei ignored both of them. "We'll meet at the southern gate in thirty minutes," Yui said. "Be ready."

Takeshi gave an enthusiastic thumbs up, and without ceremony everyone went their separate ways. Yui stayed exactly where she was; as Tamako made her way towards the merchant sector of the Village along a somewhat slack powerline, she looked back and watched her sensei. The woman was standing on the balcony of the barracks, her arms crossed. For just a moment, she and Tamako made eye contact.

Yui smirked, and Tamako did her best to smile back.

* * *

 **A Not Sick Sidestory.**


	2. Supply Run

The Sword of Stone Ch 2

Shock and Awe

 _-40 hours later-_

Tamako didn't notice when they crossed the border separating the Land of Earth from its neighbors. There was nothing demarking it, not even a natural barrier of some sort: no river, canyon, mountain range, forest, not even a sign. She only knew they were in a different country thanks to her sensei telling her.

The farther south they had traveled from the Village, the less familiar everything had grown. Tamako had called Iwagakure her home her whole life, and the other two times she had left it she hadn't ranged more than ten or twenty kilometers away. She knew the mountains around it well, but the thick forests and occasional stretch of verdant tundra surprised her. She'd never seen so much open space. The horizon being visible so far away was alien to her; over the course of the first day, as they'd gotten farther and farther from home, Tamako had started to feel like the distant sky would swallow her. Everything was so _flat_.

Her teammates hadn't betrayed similar feelings, and neither had their sensei. They'd just trudged on, keeping up the ceaseless kilometer devouring jog-leap that shinobi were trained to maintain for long-distance running. It amazed Tamako that they could cover so much ground so quickly without tiring out. Chakra was an incredible thing.

"We're past the Land of Grass now," Hideaki said, and Tamako turned to look at him. It was late in the afternoon, and the sun burned down on them from the horizon, casting angry yellow light through thick grey clouds. The team was moving across a plain, interspersed by cracks in the earth and the occasional tree. Grass and moss covered everything. Tamako had never seen a desert, but this is what she imagined one might look like if it were damp.

Hideaki was behind her, Takeshi to her left, and Yui up ahead.

"We didn't go through it?" Tamako asked, and Hideaki shook his head. "How do you know?"

He shrugged, his wide shoulders seemingly straining against his blue jacket. "I memorize maps," he said.

Tamako raised an eyebrow, shifting the pack on her back. It didn't make a noise. "For fun?"

"I suppose," Hideaki said with another shrug. "They're interesting. For example-" he pointed east, "-if I'm right, there should be a canyon that starts about four kilometers in that direction, called Shattered Rock." He paused, scratching at a scab on his nose. "Well, Shattered Rock Canyon. One of the longest in the Nations: it runs all the way to the Hanguri Gulf. And it's quite deep. No one has managed to map the whole thing."

"No way!" Takeshi, as he often did, slammed into the conversation. "What made it?"

Tamako bit her lip. "Takeshi, that's basic stuff, you know," she said, desperate not to sound too patronizing. "It was probably erosion, especially if it connects to the gulf. Or maybe a tectonic shift-"

"Actually," Hideaki chimed in. He was still subdued, but for once Tamako heard something like coyness in his voice. "Shattered Rock Canyon is man-made."

Tamako stared at her teammate. She was sure she'd misheard. Takeshi whistled.

"No way," he said. "That's…"

"He's not messing with you," Yui said, and Tamako jumped. Their sensei had appeared just behind her, leaning over her to catch Takeshi's gaze. "Are you, Hideaki?"

The squat boy shook his head. "No ma'am," he said quietly. Tamako found her hand fiddling with her hitai-ate, and snatched it away. "The canyon was carved out nearly seventy years ago by Hashirama Senju, during a battle between him and forces led by the First Tsuchikage."

Yui grinned an discomforting grin. "Sounds about right."

"Sensei," Tamako said. "The… the First Hokage really carved out a canyon that big?" The idea made her dizzy. The Hanguri Gulf was over a seven hundred kilometers away; carving out something that long and deep was completely ridiculous. And the Shodai wasn't even a Doton user, as far as she knew.

"Yeah," Yui said, far too casually. "All the Kage are pretty amazing shinobi." She locked eyes with Tamako. "And besides, he had quite an impressive Kekkei Genkai."

A Bloodline Limit. Yui winked, and Tamako felt her guts twist.

"Wow," Takeshi said, smiling widely. "That's nuts. Good thing he's dead then, huh?"

"That's for sure," Yui said. "But hey, that's practically ancient history now." She looked to Hideaki. "So, Mr. Map Guy, if you're so sure we're past Grass by now, where should we be?"

Hideaki frowned. "We should have passed into the Land of Rain a couple kilometers back. I am curious why we did so without issue." Tamako looked around, along with Takeshi. He was probably thinking the same thing as her. It didn't _feel_ like they were in another country.

"Oh, right," Yui said, and for the first time in hours she slowed to walking pace. Her genin fell in alongside her. "Well, it's pretty simple. The Land of Rain _technically_ extends pretty far north, but really, the territory doesn't belong to anyone." She gestured around at the plains. "Most of this area borders Stone, Wind, Grass, and Rain. To them, it's essentially neutral ground. Though…" She smiled. "Lots of the battles were fought around here. People only care about it in times of war."

Tamako and her teammates stayed silent at that, and Yui let the silence soak in. "We're almost there," she eventually said. "You all made good time." With that, she began to jog.

The team picked up the pace once more, following their teacher. Tamako barely took note of where she was going, leaving it up to instinct to guide her steps. She was too consumed with what her sensei had said just a minute before.

' _And besides, he had quite an impressive Kekkei Genkai.''_

As Tamako ran, she glanced down at her right hand, flexing it and watching the shifting of her tendons and muscle. She focused, chakra welling up inside her like a rush of boiling water, a spot the size of her thumb appeared on the back of her hand. It was silvery and slightly reflective, and as Tamako concentrated it spread across her hand until it eventually covered the everything up to her wrist. Her hand grew a tad warmer, insulated from the elements, and Tamako shifted it again, watching her knuckles rise up against her hardened skin as tendons operate normally despite their metal coating.

For what seemed like the hundredth time, Tamako marveled at her hand of steel. As with every time she saw it, she couldn't but consider what the Tsuchikage had told her the day she had graduated the Academy, not so long ago.

###

An hour later, Yui stopped once more. As far as Tamako could tell, they were still pretty much in the middle of nowhere. The sun had entirely set by now, and everything was covered in shadows. Nevertheless, Tamako's eyes cut through the dark. Off in the distance, perhaps about ten kilometers away, she could see a rather tall plateau, around which the plains seemed to drop off. It was the only landmark of note.

It was pouring rain. The downpour had come extremely suddenly, a wall of water cutting the world in half. Tamako was soaked, and she didn't like it one bit.

"Here," Yui said, and everyone came to a stop behind her. Tamako groaned under her breath, lifting the heavy backpack she was carrying to give her shoulders a bit of room.

"What's _here_ , sensei?" Takeshi asked. "There's nothing."

Yui chuckled, and began making a series of hand signs. She ran through about twelve too fast to follow. Tamako hadn't seen her sensei use a technique that required that many before. Without a word, the woman pressed her palm to the muddy ground.

There was a rumble. Distant thunder. But just a second after that, there was a much _closer_ rumble, and a mound rose out of the ground before Yui's hands. It grew taller and taller, yawning like a dripping mouth, and within moments a tiny hill with a deep hole dug into the earth had raised itself up in front of Tamako's sensei.

"C'mon." Yui walked around the hill, fearlessly striding down into the earth. After a moment of hesitation, her genin followed. Tamako expected a slick slope, but instead she found herself walking down neatly spaced stairs cut out of stone. It wasn't a long flight, only descending about twenty-five feet, but by the time Tamako reached the bottom what little light had been on the surface vanished entirely.

"Can't even see my hands," Takeshi mumbled. For once, he didn't sound too cheerful. Somewhere in the dark, Yui chuckled. Then, she knocked on something. It sounded like wood.

A door opened, and Tamako blinked, not understanding what she was seeing as comfortable light spilled into the cavern.

"Hey, you made it!" A tall man with a flack jacket and a burnished red goatee popped into view, and Tamako made an undignified sound. "Huh, Yui Tono? _You're_ doing a supply run?"

"Well," the woman stepped forward, into the light, "me and my genin." Tamako and her teammates followed her, all blinking at the sudden light.

" _Pffft._ " The man, probably a chunin, made it very clear what he thought of that. "Lucky you."

Tamako looked around. Hidden down twenty-five feet below the ground was what she could only call a cozy listening post. The room they were in had a decent ceiling, about nine feet up, and the floor formed a perfect square, each wall about twenty feet long. All things considered, it was rather spacious, with everything carved of perfectly smooth stone. Furniture as well: a long table with a bench, cabinets, even a desk. There was an open book laid on the table. It reminded Tamako of her living room.

And it made perfect sense. She didn't know why she'd never considered how obvious it would be that Stone's listening posts would be underground. It almost annoyed her.

"Damn," Takeshi said, looking around. "This is pretty cool."

"Yeah, for the first week I'd say," the chunin said as the genin shucked their backpacks, placing them carefully by the door. "After that, it starts to feel a little cramped." He paced over towards the packs. "Hey, you guys bring some biscuits? I've really been craving some biscuits."

"We should have some." Hideaki opened up his pack and started rifling through it, careful not to let anything spill on the floor. "Hmm. Might be near the bottom."

"Anything interesting going on?" Yui asked. She walked over to the bench and lounged out on it. She didn't look like she'd just run through a rainstorm. Tamako joined her, resting her feet. "Where's your partner?"

"He's taking a nap." The goateed chunin gestured towards the only other door in the room, which remain closed. There weren't any beds in the room, so Tamako assumed the door led to where the lookouts slept. "As for anything interesting going on, yeah, actually."

"Oh?" Yui sat up a bit more; Tamako did the same. The chunin nodded.

"Yeah. Already sent a report to the Village, obviously, but this week's been busy," he said, jerking a finger over his shoulder. "Been hearing a lot of movement over by Amegakure. Tough not to, really."

The post must have been equipped with some sort of seismic tool, or perhaps one of the shinobi there had a technique for it. At any rate, Tamako understood what the man was saying after a few moments. They'd been observing a lot of movement through the ground.

"Hmm. Any idea why?" Yui asked, leaning forward. The man shrugged.

"None. But it's mostly stopped now. The last few days have been-"

There was a massive _CRACK_ , like a hammer the size of a city had come down without warning. The entire room shook, bits of the ceiling falling. Yui was on her feet in an instant, with Tamako right behind her. Both Takeshi and the chunin lost their footing. Hideaki stayed still, on one knee.

"Everyone okay?" the chunin yelled from the floor, and more bits of stone fell from the ceiling. Tamako's ears were ringing; she hardly heard him.

After a second of pure confusion, the other door to the room burst open, and a man wearing shorts and nothing else stumbled out, a kunai clenched in either hands.

"Attack?!" he yelled, looking around with wild eyes.

"Jeez! Man, put the knives down!" the chunin yelled, staggering back up. Yui looked around, her eyes narrow, and without a word headed for the exit. Tamako stumbled after her. The woman rushed up the stairs, now slick with rainwater, and Tamako continued to follow.

Yui burst out onto the surface, and Tamako right after her. The woman looked around like a hunting dog.

"That way," she said curtly, and then she was off, sprinting through the mud. Tamako chased after her. She'd been running for a minute before she realized the rain had stopped. The night was silent at first, but as Tamako ran she started to hear distant sounds; smaller bangs, almost like explosions. Slowly but surely, she started to catch up to Yui, panting from the effort. By the time she had, four minutes had passed; the time had slipped by her in bits and spurts, unceremoniously vanishing. The distant noises had ceased.

"Sensei!" she shouted, and Yui looked back at her, not slowing her pace. "Where are you going?!" They were both getting closer to the plateau Tamako had seen earlier; it was only a couple kilometers away now.

"We're finding out what the hell that was!" Yui shouted back, and then doubled her pace. Tamako struggled to keep up, her legs pounding furiously through the mud and puddles left by the abruptly banished rain.

"Should we really be heading _towards_ -?!" she started to say.

Then, beyond the plateau, something detonated.

The explosion was so loud that Tamako didn't really _hear_ it so much as feel it. It slammed her backwards, making her bare her teeth and bring up one hand to cover her ear. Her entire body vibrated with the sound, pressing in on her organs and raising goosebumps on her neck. She'd never heard anything so loud in her life. It utterly dwarfed the earlier sound.

There was a moment of shocked silence, as though the world couldn't believe something had dared to be so loud, and then another, extraordinarily different sound followed the first. It was ridiculous, Tamako thought. How could any sound exist after that? But it came nonetheless.

It was a _roar_ , dominating the night and sending Tamako's heart pounding harder than it already was. She felt like it would burst. The sound was as though all the predators in the world had come together in one grand orchestra. A primal fear wormed up inside her, something she'd never felt in her life.

 _Run away_ , the true fear said.

 _You're nothing more than food._

"Sensei!" she screamed again, and this time is was more a plea than a question. And this time, Yui actually stopped, looking back. Tamako finally caught up to her, doubling over, her hands on her knees and her breath bellowing mutely in her ears.

She looked up, and found Yui looking down on her. The woman actually looked concerned.

"Tamako," she said. Her voice sounded so quiet now; Tamako had to strain to hear her. "Don't be afraid. I'm here." Tamako nodded, but she didn't feel any safer.

"We have to keep moving," Yui said. She put one hand on Tamako's shoulder; in the other, she held a kunai. There was a tag wrapped around it, covered in unrecognizable kanji. "Stay behind me, okay?" She didn't wait for a response. Instead, Yui was off once more, stalking towards the elevated ground, only minutes away to someone with the speed of a shinobi.

Tamako hesitated for just a moment. Ahead was terror… and her teacher. Behind her was an expanse of empty black. It didn't take long for her to decide to follow Yui instead. At least then, she thought, she wouldn't be alone.

The world slipped into turgid time as Tamako slunk by her sensei's side. She had no idea where her teammates were: presumably, they were waiting back by the post, with the other experienced shinobi. What had they thought of her and their sensei running off into the dark? It was only now that Tamako realized Yui probably hadn't meant to be followed. Instinct had carried her after her teacher.

Why had she done that, and not her teammates?

' _You were born to be a shinobi.'_

Was there more truth to that statement then she'd realized? Tamako had never seriously thought of herself in that capacity. But just now, she'd run _towards_ what was almost certainly danger, along with her teacher, instead of doing the sane thing and hunkering down. That wasn't normal.

The thoughts made the time pass rapidly. Tamako hardly noticed just how fast the world was slipping by.

They were halfway up the slopes of the plateau, mud cascading under their feet and small scrubs tumbling down the hill as they were uprooted, when the sun rose again with a tremendous keening shout, followed by a deafening _slap_. Tamako tensed: it sounded like a prelude to a massive explosion, like what had come before. But the follow-up blast never came. Instead, the hill lit up with new day. Tamako looked up and beheld a silent ball of fire hanging low in the sky, only a dozen kilometers away. A second later a wall of hard air slammed against her, a tidal wave of invisible force. It failed to force her back even a step, but it was impossible to ignore.

She looked back and saw her own shadow stretched for dozens of meters, snaking far away to the east. And then, as suddenly as the light had appeared, it fled. The shadow was swallowed by a greater black; the night returned, darker than ever. Tamako turned around. Her teacher had stopped dead in her tracks, and the enormous ball of fire had vanished.

"Bijuudama," Tamako's teacher whispered. Yui wasn't looking at her; she seemed lost in her own world. "That's impossible."

"Bijuudama?" Tamako asked. She'd never heard the word in her life, but its meaning was obvious: Tailed Beast Bomb.

"Just a bit closer," Yui said. But this time, when she moved, she moved with terrific caution. Slow, so much slower than she had before. With seemingly no choice, Tamako followed her once more. Cold sweat dripped down her neck, and her knuckles were clenched so tightly they'd surely gone white.

When they finally reached the top of the plateau, it only took a few more seconds of walking to reveal what lay beyond it. Tamako wouldn't call it a valley, but the entire area was lower than the plain they'd just come from. It was dominated by a massive lake, wide and dark, and an equally huge city that lay in the middle of it.

But the city was gutted and broken. Even from ten kilometers away, it was obvious to Tamako that it had been subject to unbelievable destruction. Most of its buildings, massive constructions of steel and concrete, had been cast down into rubble, and huge gashes were carved in the cityscape, obvious channels of _absence_ where an unbelievable amount of material had been stripped away, or simply ceased to exist. One such channel spanned more than half the city, a straight line where the dense urban buildings gave way to a wasteland.

It was like a paper bag ripped to shreds, or a ribcage torn open, its bones scattered. Looking at the scale of devastation made Tamako's throat tighten. Steam and smoke was everywhere, along with an occasional distant flickering light. Her mind couldn't fully wrap around what she was seeing: the corpse of a city, cast in shadows

"What…" the words slipped out of her mouth, barely a whisper, as her sensei looked on the wreckage with a grim face. Slowly, one of the few unmarred buildings in the city, the tallest of them, toppled at a terrifying glacial pace. It had probably been brought down by some structural damage rendered invisible by the distance; Tamako could only watch in horror as it collapsed in slow motion, slamming into the wrecked city with a dull rumble.

"Amegakure," Yui said, and Tamako wrenched her eyes away from the city to her sensei. The woman's eyes were narrow: she betrayed nothing, but Tamako knew in her gut the woman was feeling something similar to her. "This was Amegakure."

The Village Hidden in the Rain. Tamako couldn't believe the listening post had been so close to it. Then again, it had been underground. It made sense to be that bold when it could easily avoid detection from a smaller village with less skilled shinobi, like Ame.

But that hardly mattered now. Something had turned one of the minor villages into a wasteland, and Tamako had no idea how.

"Tamako, we're leaving." Yui turned and strode away, and Tamako almost stumbled over her own feet turning after her.

"Why?" Tamako asked. "Shouldn't we-?"

She stopped herself. What could they do? Try to help foreign shinobi? Run down into the Village without knowing what had destroyed it, and recently, judging by the noise and light? It would be foolishness at best, suicide at worst.

"We need to return to Iwagakure," Yui said, moving into a run. "The Tsuchikage must know. _I_ _mmediately_."

And so without a word in protest, Tamako Shirogane turned her back on the shattered Village and fled into the dark.


	3. Family

The Sword of Stone

Chapter 3

 _One Week Before the Kage Summit_

###

It was a cold day in Iwagakure, forcing its citizens inside. As Tamako looked out over the Village, her keen eyes picked out only the occasional traveler, mostly shinobi, though she spotted the rare civilian struggling through the heavy winds, universally bundled in several layers of bright clothing.

Tamako wasn't worried by the cold. Regulating one's internal body temperature was a very basic exercise for shinobi, drilled into them in the Academy, and it was an enjoyable chakra exercise besides. As she sat on the balcony of her family home, she focused on the coursing energy just below her skin, flooding her system and keeping her cozy. All she'd bothered to add to her ordinary outfit was a thick black sweater, and yet the only mark the wind made on her was a chill on her cheeks.

It really was amazing, she thought, and for what seemed like the millionth time she wondered if she was the only one on her team who noticed the little miracles that chakra brought to everyday life. The chair under her was an intricate red and orange construction of spiraling plastic and stainless steel; her father had picked it up somewhere in the Land of Lightning, though for the life of him he could never remember the name of the woman he'd bought it from. It was a common gripe in Tamako's family that the chair was unusable in weather like this, which Iwagakure experienced every winter, since it grew far too cold to comfortably sit in. And yet, here she was, as comfortable as could be.

And yet as she looked out over her village, Tamako shivered. It wasn't due to the cold. Instead, it was an inner chill that wormed its way up from her gut and into her heart. The sprawling bridges and domes of the Hidden Stone did not appear as impenetrable to her as they had just a week ago. The Village looked smaller. More fragile.

To Tamako, it was too easy to see where the channels of absence would be ripped, where the Village could be torn apart with cruel ease. It was too easy to imagine the screams of her countrymen, the way the sky would go black with smoke and ash.

It was too easy to see Amegakure where Iwagakure lay.

Tamako knew it wasn't reasonable, let alone rational. The Village Hidden in the Rain had been small and poorly defended compared to Stone. Whatever had happened to it could never happen to a major Village, one of the original five. That was crazy-talk.

But she was still shivering, and Tamako hated that. Her sensei's words were resonating through her, and they brought the chill with them.

"Sensei?"

Yui Tono had been sitting in a rather bare chair outside the Tsuchikage's office when Tamako had tried to get her attention. The whole team had been sent there immediately when they'd returned, at Yui's insistence. But now, with their report delivered, Hideaki and Takeshi had left. They'd probably wanted to go back to their families.

But Yui had stayed, and Tamako had stayed with her, sitting across the hall from her. Her sensei had just stared at the bare stone ground of the hallway, her hands clasped between her knees. Tamako had needed to repeat the question to get her to look up.

"Yes, Tamako?" She'd sounded tired. Tamako had never heard Yui sound tired, but for once she'd understood her teacher perfectly.

"What…" She had swallowed. It seemed so stupid in retrospect, but she hadn't known what to say. "How… what did that?"

She hadn't needed to clarify.

"Amegakure?" Yui had closed her eyes, pulling herself up in the chair with a deep breath. "Well, it's impossible to know for sure, of course, but I guess there's no harm in telling you." She'd pursed her lips. "Do you know about the Bijuu, Tamako?"

"Umm…" Tamako had recognized the name, but not much else. "Yeah, of course. The Tailed Beasts. There're nine of them, right?" She'd blinked, struck out of her fugue. "The Nine-Tails killed the Fourth Hokage, right? I wasn't born yet, but there's still parties all around the village every October."

"Yeah, exactly." Yui had said with a genuinely relieved smile. Konoha's Fourth Kage had been before Tamako's time, but she still understood the fear and hatred the Yellow Flash had invoked, and the peace his death had brought. "Nine beasts, each with a different number of tails. One, two, three, four, whatever. You get the idea. They're all mindless, enormously powerful, and obviously dangerous for it."

"Are you saying one of them destroyed Amegakure?"

"In a way." Yui had scooted forward in her chair, and Tamako had leaned in as well. "Now, what I'm about to tell you is technically classified." Tamako had blinked, but Yui had shaken her head. "It's on a 'need-to-know' basis, and I'm putting you in that category." She'd gathered her thoughts. "What you know about the Bijuu isn't the full picture. The main thing you need to understand is the sacrifice each village makes: the Jinchuriki."

Human sacrifice. Tamako had listened in astonishment as Yui had laid out the village policy around Jinchuriki: humans who had had the honor and misfortune of having Bijuu sealed into them. They functioned both as ways for the Village to safely tap the enormous power of the Bijuu, and direct it as it saw fit… and as indiscriminate weapons of mass destruction.

No Jinchuriki could ever be truly as powerful as the creature held inside of them after all, even if they learned to tap its power. But in a desperate situation, the solution was simple. Crack the seal holding the Beast back, and keep its rampage at a safe distance (one measured in hundreds of kilometers when it came to Bijuu).

"All of the Bijuu are accounted for," Yui had ended the explanation, her words nearly curtailed by an invisible hesitation. "Meaning that if one destroyed Amegakure, as we suspect, it must have been the work of a Jinchuriki."

Tamako had sucked in a breath. "From which Village?"

"We'll find out." Yui had narrowed her eyes. "In due time. But the main concern now is reconciling what we saw with what could have caused it."

"What do you mean?"

For the first time since Tamako had met her, Yui Tono had looked unmistakably grim.

"When we reached it, Amegakure had been recently destroyed. But there was no sign of whatever had caused that kind of devastation, or what had fired off that Bijuudama we saw. Bijuu are enormous: one couldn't have been hiding in the city, even in the dark. So that leaves three conclusions." Yui sighed. "The first is that it ran off before we could get eyes on. That's possible, but unlikely. Bijuu are _fast_ , especially for something so big, but it couldn't have gotten out of range, with no cover, so quickly. So that's probably out."

Tamako had nearly forgotten to breathe while her teacher was talking.

"The second is that someone within Amegakure managed to seal the Bijuu after it destroyed the village but, again, before we could see it. Like the first one, this is possible, but it's also very unlikely. Amegakure was a small village, without a large cadre of experienced ninja, and so someone there having the skills to seal a Bijuu would be very, very unusual. Iwagakure, or one of the other Villages, would doubtlessly have learned about someone with such a skill."

Yui had blown out a breath, leaning back in her chair, against the cold stone wall. "Which leaves option three."

Tamako had already figured it out for herself, to a degree, but she'd let her teacher finish.

"A Jinchuriki from one of the other Villages independently destroyed Amegakure, for reasons we couldn't possibly yet know, and they did it by harnessing the power of their Bijuu. Then, when they were done... " She'd shrugged. "They 'put it back,' I guess you could say."

After that, Yui and Tamako had sat in silence for a long time. Tamako hadn't known what her teacher had been thinking: she'd been too consumed by her own gradual terror.

"Here." Yui's voice had startled Tamako. "I remembered something." Her sensei had been rooting around in one of her pockets: after a moment she'd drawn out a small orange book. After flipping through it for several seconds, she'd shown one of the pages to Tamako, her thumb holding the book open.

There'd been a picture there: an ordinary looking older man with a full red beard and mustache, most of his head covered by a triple-pronged helmet. His eyes had been like Tamako's, full and black.

"Roshi." Yui had tapped the man's name, just above his picture. "A shinobi of Iwagakure, and the Jinchuriki of the Yonbi."

Tamako had stared, fascinated by the ordinary looking man. She never would have guessed he was a living weapon.

"You're not the only one with hidden talents," Yui had said, putting the small book back. Tamako had looked down. "Roshi was good: he'd taken a lot of the Yonbi's skills as his own." She'd idly cracked one of her knuckles.

"But whoever was at Amegakure was on another level."

###

The glass door behind her slid open with a _crack_ as a thimbleful of ice in its hinges shattered under sudden pressure, and Tamako started with a gasp, twisting her head around abruptly. Her father stuck his head through the sudden gap, grinning at her through his thick beard.

"Tamako!" he said, his voice as deep and boisterous as ever. "You'll catch your death out there!" His dark eyes betrayed the mirth behind the statement, though he managed to sound serious despite them. "Wouldn't you rather be inside?"

"Uhh." Tamako kicked herself for getting caught off guard by her father once more. Something like that shouldn't happen to a shinobi: she'd heard him coming a mile away, but only realized it after he'd already arrived. She needed to stop getting sucked into her own head.

"Tamako?"

Crap. She was doing it again. Tamako shook visions of a gutted city out of her head and turned her whole attention to her father. "Yeah, dad?"

"Do you wanna come inside?" he offered again, and Tamako considered. She considered her father as well, watching him out of the corner of her eye. The mirth had retreated slightly from his face, and been replaced with muted concern. He was worried for her, she realized, but over what? There was no way he could tell what she was thinking, and he didn't know anything about her last mission.

She was underestimating him, though. That was obvious. He was her father, and even if they'd grown more distant since she'd attended the academy, he still knew her better than anyone. He must have picked up on her mood subconsciously.

"I dunno, dad," she said honestly, and her father frowned. "I was thinking about watching the sunset, y'know?"

"It's too cold for that, jewel." She hated that nickname. Well, she'd loved it as a little girl, but now it just felt goofy. Tamako had outgrown it; a shinobi couldn't have her parents calling her "Jewel." Her sensei would never let her live it down. "Come on inside." Her father jerked his head. "Kei wants to see you."

Kei: Tamako's younger sister. She looked just like her, but infinitely cuter, something for which Tamako was perpetually jealous. The little girl's button nose and coal eyes always drew adoring looks whenever Tamako chaperoned her, looks which Tamako herself never remembered receiving. Nowadays, they were out of the question. Citizens of Iwa did not give their shinobi adoring looks.

Kei was coming closer to her eighth birthday, Tamako realized. How had that happened? She had always been so small. At the moment, nothing sounded better than enjoying some time with her sibling. Perhaps she could take her mind off her mission.

The thought of Ame brought doubt with it, and Tamako frowned. Her father narrowed his eyes at the look, watching as his daughter's face dropped.

She wondered what the Jinchuriki who had leveled Amegakure looked like. Were they an ordinary man, like Roshi? Which village were they from? As Tamako wondered on the topic, and tried not to, a shadowy figure took form in her mind's eye. A tall man with a cruel smile and oddly bright eyes. It was a bit melodramatic, but she couldn't conceive of someone who could level a village; who could control the same kind of power that had killed the Yellow Flash.

Tamako had to face it. She was in a rotten mood. Now, with that fact resonating throughout her body, the notion of playing with Kei seemed less appealing. She was seized by the worry that she'd be rude to her sister, or that worse, Kei would pick up on something: she was an intuitive kid. And if Kei did, what could Tamako say? How could she explain to her what she'd seen? If she didn't, her younger sister would pester her incessantly ( _Taaamaaaaako, what iiiiiiiisssss it?_ )as she always did, and then Tamako would snap at her for sure.

It might be better to stay outside, she thought. At least then, there was no risk of her hurting her sister.

"I'll stay out here," Tamako decided out loud, and her father's features darkened.

"Tamako," he snapped, obviously irritated. She stared back at him, trying not to show any emotion. "You shouldn't shut people out."

"I'm not!" she protested, her emotionless act instantly falling apart. "I'm just-!" She took a breath, steadying herself, quelling the shout in her chest. "I'm not."

Her father looked right through her, and when he spoke his voice was deceptively quiet. "You can't let what the Tuschikage told you dominate your life," he said calmly, and Tamako bristled. "You're still my daughter, and your sister's sibling. On that front, nothing has changed." He yanked the door fully open. "I don't care if you're stronger than me now: get _in_ here."

Tamako took a deeper breath that crushed the ire growing inside her, desperate to avoid a fight. She grudgingly rose from the chair and slouched towards the door, her father turning away from her as she drew closer. Inwardly, she laughed a little at his final comment.

He really was still riled up at her being able to crush him whenever they arm-wrestled. Well, she couldn't blame him: not many grown men ended up beaten by their pre-teen daughters in a competition like that.

"Tamako!" Ah, there it was. Kei was still young enough to _squeak_ , a sound that hung just between endearing and annoying, whenever she spoke loudly enough. "You _are_ here!" Kei ran up with the innate headlong grace of an eight year old, laughing carelessly, and smashed into Tamako's midsection, nearly bowling her over. "Can we play Knives?!" Kei babbled with infectious excitement as she clung to her sister.

"Yeah, of course Kei." Tamako somehow managed to extricate herself, slipping out of her sister's iron grip. "Let me just go get them." _They_ were a set of rubber kunai Tamako had practiced with, back when she was unsure of her knife work. Naturally, Kei adored them.

Yet as Tamako wandered over the high cabinet that kept the dull tools out of reach of her little sister, she couldn't stop her mind was wandering in an entirely different direction. Back, away from all this, to just a couple months before. As she retrieved the knives and moved back to play with her sister, an old conversation seized her thoughts.

###

The very first thing Tamako had noticed was just how short the leader of her village was. She'd never laid eyes on the Tsuchikage before that meeting in his tower: if she'd seen him in the street, she might have stared. Tamako wasn't especially tall for her age, only about four feet and eight inches, though her mother always insisted that when she was older she'd tower over her peers, much like she herself did. But the Tsuchikage was an unusually tiny man: Tamako had a half dozen inches on him, and her parents, who had come with her to meet the Kage, stood tall over the both of them.

He had been old, too. Old, and wrinkled, and bent-backed, which had made him seem even smaller. His wispy white hair and bulbous nose completed an almost comical picture.

If it hadn't been for the quiet determination and absolute, unbending authority the man radiated, Tamako would never have guessed he led a Hidden Village. But thanks to them, his rank was unmistakable. Tamako had been standing before one of the most dangerous people in the entire world, and she'd known it.

"Tamako Shirogane," he'd said. He'd sounded as old as he looked, but his voice was so sharp and so steady it had almost frightened her. "Congratulations on your graduation."

Tamako had thanked him as politely as she could. She'd been shaking, just a little. The man had noticed.

"I hope you understand why you are here," the Tsuchikage had said, and Tamako had nodded. The old man had frowned back, and looked to her parents. "None of your family is a member of the corps, I'm told."

"Yes sir." Tamako's mother looked eerily like her, but far more beautiful and much taller. She'd met the Kage's eyes when she spoke for her daughter; Tamako had barely believed it. "Tamako will be the first of our family to become a shinobi."

She'd trembled again. There, then, the reality of it was clear. She'd graduated, but she still hadn't been sure she really _wanted_ to be a soldier. Only circumstance had brought her to that point. It felt out of her control.

No, it _was_ out of her control.

"Hmm." The Tsuchikage had looked back to her. His eyes had grown a bit softer; Tamako had no longer felt as though she were watching a mountain come down on top of her. "Will you show me, Tamako?"

It had been obvious what the Kage had been talking about. Tamako had concentrated, the familiar boiling sensation rushing up throughout her body. Gradually at first but rapidly growing faster, the warm feeling had sped across her skin. Before she'd known it, her entire body had been cloaked in steel.

She'd blinked with eyelids coated in metal, sure that they'd scrape against her eyes. And yet, as with every time before, she'd felt no heavier, and nothing had grinded her eyes away. The Tsuchikage had watched her with a small, satisfied smile.

"A random mutation," he'd said, echoing what a dozen other men and women had told Tamako and her family before. "One in a million." He'd stepped forward, holding out his hand, and after a moment of hesitation Tamako had taken it. Quicker than Tamako could track, a kunai had slid out of one of his long sleeves into his other hand, and he'd stabbed down at the hand he'd held.

Tamako had flinched, but it had been pointless. The knife had been stopped cold by her steel skin. Before she could say a word, the kunai had been stowed. The whole thing had been too fast for her parents to see; all they'd heard was the sound of metal on metal.

She'd looked into the Tsuchikage's eyes, and seen a mix of cold satisfaction and genuine warmth that had forever stayed with her.

"I wanted to thank you personally, Shirogane, for deciding not to waste this _talent_ of yours." Tamako had known he'd been talking both to her, and her parents. "You were born to be a shinobi, and with this," the Tsuchikage had said, gesturing at her steel skin, "you will be an exceptional one."

He'd paused, and then clicked his tongue.

" _Seishingane_ ," the Tsuchikage had said definitively. His word had been final. "That is the name we have picked for your bloodline." He'd released Tamako's hand, reaching into his cloak. "You will be a blade of the village; an unbreakable weapon, serving in protection of your family and your friends."

His hand had emerged from his clothes. It had been holding a hitai-ate, gleaming and new.

"With this, you will become the sword of Stone."

###

"Ow!"

Tamako flinched, drawn out of herself and back into the present. Kei was nursing one of her fingers, sucking on the nail. One of the rubber kunai lay on the floor next to her.

"Tamako!" she said, thrusting her finger out of her mouth and into Tamako's face. "I cut my finger!" The nail was already going a light purple, Tamako noted: Kei must have hit herself in the hand, and rather hard, at least for an eight year old. "Am I gonna die?!"

Tamako gravely examined her sister's finger, holding it gently and looking back and forth between it and her sister's face. Every time she swapped her line of sight, she forced her expression to grow grimmer. By consequence, Kei's grew more and more distraught.

"Hmmm," Tamako pondered deeply, giving Kei's finger one last knowing look. "It's not too bad." As her sister started to beam, Tamako laughed. "You'll only lose the rest of the hand."

"Hey!" Kei yelled, poking Tamako in the cheek. "That's mean!" Her face grew worried. "They're not even sharp!" The little girl sounded like she barely believed herself. Before she could actually panic, Tamako laughed.

"Darn," she giggled, and Kei giggled with her. "You're too clever for me."

"I am!" Kei agreed. She picked the rubber kunai back up. "And I'm the best at knives!"

Tamako chuckled. It felt good. This was the first time she'd laughed out loud since returning to the village.

Her father had been right, she thought as she played with Kei, tossing knives back and forth and in a moment of pride, juggling three to her sister's astonishment. She may have been a sword of Stone, but she had a family too. When she was home, she had to make sure to appreciate them.

Her father was watching them, his bald head shining in the light from the hallway. Tamako saw him in her peripheral vision, catching the fleeting smile, before he turned down the hall and was gone, deeper into the house.

A sheath, she thought, catching a kunai on the tip of one finger. Kei squealed, green with envy, and Tamako grinned at her. That's what house was now: a place for her to rest, to relax.

To ensure she stayed sharp.

To remember why, in the end, she had chosen to become a sword.


	4. Recon

The Sword in the Stone

Chapter 4

 _Two Weeks After the Kage Summit_

* * *

Three weeks and eight D-rank missions after she'd played with her sister for the first time in too long, Tamako's team was finally assigned another, more exciting sort of mission. Unlike the last, it wasn't a C-rank.

Takeshi whistled when he read the mission detail. "That's a lot of money," he mouthed quietly as he passed the scroll off to Hideaki, who scrutinized it with squinted eyes. The taciturn boy raised his eyebrows in surprise, before handing the scroll to Tamako. It took her longer than she'd admit to make sure she was counting the number of zero's correctly.

"What's the deal, sensei?" Takeshi asked as Tamako had passed the scroll back to Yui, who silently folded it up and placed it in a hidden pocket. "I mean, I get it's a B-rank, but that's real pricey."

Yui sighed. "You need to work on your reading comprehension, Takeshi," she said as she closed the pocket. "This mission is directly from the Daimyo…" she tapped his lip. "Or at least his court. Eh, it's just semantics. Point is, important people with fancy hats want this job done, and they're willing to pay out the ass for it."

Takeshi snickered, but Tamako and Hideaki remained quizzical. It seemed too good to be true.

"The Daimyo's court paying well is sensible," Hideaki spoke up. "However, I do not understand why this mission is being presented to us in the first place."

Tamako nodded, formless thoughts stirred into explicit terms and questions by Hideaki's words. "Yeah: a B-rank mission is a bit… much for a team of genin, isn't it sensei? We only graduated a couple months ago."

"You're an exceptional team," Yui said flatly, and then, with a small grin, "and I'm an exceptional teacher. This mission wouldn't be handed over to any team of genin. But you're both right. It is very unusual for something of this nature to be given to a team with as little experience as ours: especially a recon. However, this recommendation was handed down by the Tsuchikage himself."

"Whoa." Takeshi didn't bother to hide his surprise. Tamako did, but poorly. "The Tsuchikage?"

"Yup," Yui said, challenging him with direct eye contact. "This mission is being passed around to several genin teams the Jonin council's deemed appropriate, and you guys were lucky enough to be on the list. So..." She grinned a wild, true grin. "You guys gonna take the opportunity, or let some other team walk away with it?"

Tamako had looked to her teammates, and they to her and each other. They all shared the same silent conversation, which went something along the lines of–

' _That's a lot of money.'_

' _Could be dangerous.'_

' _Isn't that the point?'_

Less than ten seconds later, they found themselves nodding at each other. In unison, they presented a united front to their teacher, who read them with equally wordless efficiency. Time had bought them confidence after their last C-rank: Tamako was ready to get back in the field and serve the village in a tangible way, and her teammates felt the same way.

"Good to hear I'm not training any punks," Yui chuckled, flipping them an almost-but-not-quite-sarcastic sign of respect. "I'll tell the desk jockeys: you guys get ready. It'll be tough going." She winked. "And bring a lot of water. It's gonna be hot."

* * *

"I'm going to turn into a walnut," Takeshi stated in an extremely matter-of-fact manner, and Tamako arched her eyebrows at him. "I'm gonna sweat myself down into a little shriveled piece of crap and you're going to have to carry me back in your pocket."

They'd been walking for hours in a sea of trackless dunes, a vast desert of sand and stone that extended as far as the eye could see. Tamako had never been this far south: her father had told her a little about the relentless heat that gripped most of the Land of Wind, but she'd never really appreciated exactly what it meant. The impossibly bright sun high above constantly bore down on her with tangible dry weight, pushing her down into the sand and boiling the back of her neck and shoulders. With nothing much to look at other than more desert or her own team, there wasn't much to distract Tamako from the brutal heat. Her teammates weren't doing any better, but none of them were complaining out loud.

Until now at least.

"Get a grip, Takeshi," Tamako grunted back. When they'd first reached the desert after a day and some of travel, every step had been a struggle, but now simply walking wasn't much of a challenge. Yui had taught them all an invaluable exercise that kept their sandals from sinking into the hot sand, allowing them to glide across the dunes without effort.

Well, most of the time. Takeshi was having a little trouble keeping the chakra dispersal balanced, which occasionally became obvious when he slipped, overcompensated, and blew a half-meter deep hole in the sand under his feet, falling in up to his knees. It had only happened twice so far, but both times Tamako's teammate had gone red with embarrassment and quite unusually almost cursed his way out of the encroaching sand.

"I've got plenty of grip," Takeshi muttered, trudging on.

"Drink some more water," Hideaki offered. Of all of them (besides their sensei, of course) he had taken the most naturally to the chakra-enhanced movement. Tamako couldn't bring herself to be jealous of him. It would have been a wasted effort anyway: the stout genin was too well-mannered to stay mad at. "Water always helps."

"Man, who says that?" Takeshi shot back, even as he unscrewed the cap of his canteen. "'Water always helps?'"

"Am I wrong?" Hideaki asked.

"Wouldn't help me if I were drowning," Takeshi grumbled, taking a swig.

"Well, you're not drowning," Tamako helpfully pointed out, and Hideaki smiled at her. "Actually, it's pretty much the opposite of that."

"Dehydration." Yui appeared like a ghost out of the desert: she'd been alternating between following them at a distance and scouting ahead, though truly there didn't seem to be much out here in the wastes of Wind Country. "Deadlier than any knife."

"Ooh, that's a good one, sensei," Takeshi said, some of his humor restored by the water. "Did you come up with that?"

"Nah." Their sensei shook her head, and Tamako wondered how she wasn't sweating. Even Tamako, who had thought herself pretty excellent at regulating her body temperature with chakra, couldn't prevent a thin sheen of sweat from forming on the back of her neck and in several places beneath her cloths. Their sensei really was something else. "I stole that from a squad leader I had back in the Third War, and he probably stole it from some other guy with too much time on their hands. But it's true: a lack of supplies, especially water, can be just as deadly as a weapon, and harder to avoid. Keep that in mind."

They glided in silence for a couple minutes after that, the only sound the occasional howling of the desert wind. Eventually, Tamako spoke up again.

"How close are we now, sensei?"

"Still pretty far off," Yui said, squinting at the horizon. "I'm guessing about another fifty kilometers before we hit the actionable perimeter."

"Actionable Perimeter" was one of those terms Tamako understood the need for, but not one she appreciated. As her classes had taught her, it was where it was practical and possible for shinobi patrols and sensor jutsu to establish an effective perimeter around a defensive position. In the case of the Hidden Villages, their actual borders were rarely an "actionable perimeter," due to the chakra costs of a sensor jutsu extending that far, or the practicality of border patrols covering such a wide area.

Sunagakure was a smaller Village, especially after the losses they'd taken against Konoha three years ago, so their perimeter would probably be closer to the Village proper. Probably. Tamako was uncomfortably aware that she didn't have enough field experience to make assumptions like that. It was dangerous. But she trusted her teacher, and as long as Yui moved forward confidently, she would as well.

"Sensei," Hideaki spoke up, his foot slipping backwards on the sand for a microsecond before he corrected and regained his balance. "You served in the Third War, you said."

Yui glanced back at him. "Yeah?" Tamako was a little surprised: no one on the team had ever asked about their sensei's past, though it was clear she was more than an ordinary jōnin.

"Did you ever encounter any ninja from Sunagakure?" Hideaki asked, the rest of team listening intently as they stalked across the endless dunes. "Could you tell us anything about them?"

"Hmm." Yui scratched her cheek, wiping away a single drop of sweat that had somehow formed. "Well, not really. I mostly fought ninja from Konoha during the war. But once or twice, they probably had ninja from Suna with them: they were allied during the war, of course."

"Then why did they attack Konoha three years ago?" Takeshi asked, and Yui shook her head.

"Thing's change, alliances shift. It's inevitable. Despite that attack, nowadays, Konoha and Suna are closer than ever. But hey, one thing at a time, right?" she said, and Takeshi nodded. "So, I didn't fight any Suna-nin personally, not that I knew, but I can still tell you a little about them." She gestured around at the desert. "As you can probably tell, there's not a lot out here. Because of that, Suna's population is naturally a bit lower than the other villages, and so is their ninja corp. It's not so dramatic they're at a disadvantage in war-time, but teams of Sand-nin tend to operate in smaller platoons. They make up for that with a variety of techniques." She glanced at them cannily. "I wonder if any of you could tell me about any of them?"

"Uhh…" Tamako glanced around: neither of teammates seemed willing to answer, and for good reason. She didn't know what to say either. "Not really, sensei."

"Well hey, I guess that's lucky for you three," Yui said with a mean grin. "You haven't had to worry about them." Her smile faded. "The most famous of them is certainly their puppetry techniques, though there are others: magnetism, wind-manipulation, and somewhat widespread sealing proficiency, which often goes hand-in-hand with the puppets."

"Puppets?" Hideaki almost sounded excited. The sand crunched under their feet as the team hit a rough patch of dirt and stone.

"Yeah. It might sound crazy, but Suna has a whole puppetry corp." Yui shrugged. "I've never seen them in action, but I've heard they're quite impressive. Apparently they control life-sized puppets from a distance with strings of chakra, in all shapes and sizes, all of which are filled with nasty weapons: poison, blades, saws, that kinda stuff. It splits the attention of anyone who has to go up against them, and it's a great force-multiplier."

"Wow." Takeshi didn't sound very excited, but his smile said otherwise. "That's badass."

"Well, it's certainly useful," Yui acknowledged. "But there's no need to worry about that. The only way we'll even see Suna shinobi on this mission is if things go really wrong."

"And if they do?" Hideaki asked.

Yui smiled. "Then we run away, as fast as we can. We're in their territory, but that doesn't mean they'll attack us on sight. That's bad politics. More likely, they'll try to scare us off, and then off us if we don't take the hint. At that point, it'll practically be our fault."

"What's the point of reconnaissance if we run off at the first sign of trouble?" Takeshi seemed to be a little less irritable. That was good: it had been making Tamako uncomfortable.

"Well, that's precisely the point Takeshi," Yui said, clearly enjoying herself just a little too much. She fell behind her genin a little as they all trudged forward, her voice coming from over their shoulder. "That's why this mission is only a B-rank. We want to see how close we can get before we're chased away."

"We're testing their borders?" Hideaki asked rhetorically, glancing back for a moment. "Is this kind of mission normal?"

"No." Tamako imagined Yui shaking her head. "This is actually thanks to something recent. The Tsuchikage-"

There was a rustle, the endless wind turning over some sand, and Tamako's sensei suddenly went silent.

Tamako blinked, looking back over her shoulder.

Yui Tono was gone.

"Uh, Sensei?" she asked. Takeshi frowned and looked back as well. Slowly, both he and Tamako slowed to a stop. After a moment, Hideaki realized they had and stopped himself.

"Tamako?" Takeshi asked. "Where'd…?"

Tamako turned, scanning the horizon in every direction. There were several rolling dunes: Yui could theoretically be hiding behind one of them, but-

"She's gone," Hideaki suddenly said.

"Yeah, _we noticed_ ," Takeshi said, some irritation showing. Hideaki frowned at him.

"She stopped speaking mid-sentence," he said, sounding far too calm. Tamako was slowly coming to what she imagined was a similar conclusion. "Unless she's simply trying to scare us, there are only two conclusions. It is possible she sensed a threat and moved to deal with it."

"Or she was attacked," Tamako cut in, feeling her breathing speed up. Accompanied by a warm liquid sensation, steel spread across her vital areas: shielding her vital organs, her neck, skull, arteries, critical joints. The Seishingane's activation was half instinct and half conscious direction, and Tamako felt an odd sense of gratitude towards her freak genes.

"Yes, that is precisely what I was going to say," Hideaki finished. "And attacked in such a manner that she-"

Tamako was looking right at Hideaki when it happened. She was making eye contact with him, with Takeshi in her peripheral vision.

And yet before Tamako's eyes, her teammate vanished into the sand. It was as if the desert had vanished out from under his feet and he'd dropped away at impossible, comical speeds. Hideaki's face stretched in surprise, and then suddenly it was as if he'd never existed.

Tamako stared, drenched in cold sweat, but Takeshi acted.

"Hideaki!" Tamako's last teammate sprinted over to where Hideaki had vanished, dropping to his knees and digging into the sand. The desert and wind laughed at his efforts. As quickly as Takeshi dug, even with his superhuman speed and strength, the sand rushed back in and filled the hole. Before long, Takeshi was buried up to his forearms, with no progress made.

"Takeshi, stop!" Tamako took a step forward, her head swimming. From the heat? Panic? She didn't understand what was happening. Just twenty seconds ago her sensei had been explaining the recon to them. Twenty seconds, and now she and Hideaki had both disappeared without a trace, and Takeshi-

"Tamakohelp!"

Takeshi's panicked call blended two words into one. Tamako's feet carried her forward before she entirely understood what she was seeing. Takeshi's arms, which had already been buried in the sand up to the elbows, were sinking deeper. The teen wasn't doing it on purpose, clearly struggling as something unseen pulled him down.

"Get me out!" he called again, kicking his feet. He looked back at Tamako, his eyes wide. One of her steel-shod hands settled on his shoulder, pulling back. Finally Tamako could feel the pressure that was dragging her teammate deeper into the dune. It was incredible: she could hardly believe Tamako had been resisting it so effectively.

"It's the sand, Tamako!" he screamed, inexorably drawn away from her. Tamako bared her teeth in desperation, pulling harder, but she could do nothing to stop the desert from devouring her teammate. As Takeshi looked back at her, something in his eyes changed. His face went white.

"Let go!" Takeshi he suddenly shouted. Tamako screamed back, half-incoherent, as steel raced across the rest of her skin, fortifying her muscles and strengthening her grip. She dug her feet into the sand, becoming an unbendable pillar.

" _No_!"

Takeshi's shirt ripped, leaving Tamako holding nothing but black cloth. She reached out again, but too slowly, far too slowly. Just beneath her hand, Takeshi sunk beneath the sand with unstoppable speed, shouting all the way.

"The _sand_ , Tamako! _Run_!"

And then, just like Yui and Hideaki, he was gone. Tamako was left staring at the vague imprint in the sand that had once been her comrade, before that faded as well. She reared up, frantically glancing in every direction.

Desert. Nothing but desert all around.

She was alone in the Land of Wind, and alone in a desert that had just literally eaten her team.

Tamako thought about taking a step backwards, but realized it was pointless. There was desert in every direction. _Sand_ in every direction. Where was she supposed to run? She couldn't leave the Land of Wind before whatever had caught her team caught her as well.

But she couldn't conceive of giving up either, of lying down and waiting to die.

So instead, she stood stock still. Tamako reached deep inside herself and banished her trembling heart. Swords didn't have hearts. She forgot her sweat, her blood, her breath, and everything else. All that existed was the desert and the steel that now covered every inch of her skin.

Tamako waited. After what seemed like years, frozen on that endless plain of sand and wind, she finally heard something.

"I expected that you would run."

Tamako spun around. There was someone standing behind her: a man, no, a teen, just a couple years older than herself. She took in tertiary details, the world slipping past in slow motion, the wind stilled by her sped-up perception. Flat teal eyes, red hair. Arms crossed. Some sort of tattoo on his forehead. Red bodysuit, almost like Yui's. A huge tan gourd secured to his back.

And, perhaps strangest, no hitai-ate.

Tamako took that in during the bubble of frozen time, and then without hesitation she charged.

She made it two steps, kicking up a massive amount of sand, before the teen raised his right index finger.

The desert leapt up, fingers of sand seizing her legs and bringing her to a crashing halt. Tamako overcompensated, rocking back as she kept her balance, and without pausing to consider how much _worse_ her situation had suddenly become plucked a kunai from her hip and hurled it at the teen's face.

A wisp of sand flicked the kunai away, sending it spinning into the distance. The teen took a step towards her. "Please don't-"

Tamako concentrated, pumping chakra into her legs, desperate to break the chains of sand pinning her. The thickness of the steel sheathing her thighs and below tripled: tiny spikes emerged, pushing back at the sand. She lunged forward, one leg half breaking through the sand.

The teen cocked an eyebrow. "-resist," he finished. He extended one hand towards Tamako as she struggled to finish freeing her right leg. She broke about a centimeter more through the sand, feeling the less enhanced muscles in her upper leg straining.

The redhead made a fist.

Faster than Tamako could react, she was sucked down into the desert. Legs, hip, torso: everything was swallowed up by the sand before she could do anything more than yelp. A heartbeat later, and she was buried up to her neck.

Then, the motion stopped. Tamako sucked in a breath, on the verge of hyperventilating. Sand pressed in on her from every side, exerting soft pressure. She couldn't move a muscle. There was no way she could mount even a token resistance.

"Hmm." The redhead kept approaching her. Fruitlessly, Tamako tried to rock her body back and forth, to loosen the grip of the sand. She thrashed her head, desperate to escape. She couldn't breath.

She accomplished nothing. Three seconds later, as her vision began to darken, the teen squatted down a meter or so in front of her. The pressure of the sand withdrew, just enough for Tamako to breath easily once more.

"That's an impressive jutsu," he said, his deep voice filled with what sounded like genuine admiration. Tamako stared at him without comprehension for a moment, before she realized her entire head was still covered in steel.

There probably wasn't any point in it, but she didn't let the material recede. She needed all the protection she could get.

"I had no idea the Land of Earth had such a jutsu in its possession. Though…" he looked her in the eye, and out of some sense of childish fear Tamako refused to blink. "You are quite young. Perhaps a Kekkei Genkai."

Tamako didn't think she'd given any sign, but she saw a flash of satisfaction in the teen's flat eyes nonetheless. "Interesting." He eased down, helped by small tendrils of sand, and sat in a cross-legged stance. "What's your name?"

Tamako silently stared at him, considering how she could escape. It was obvious this shinobi (and he must have been, despite the lack of hitai-ate) could control the sand in some way: she was pinned now, but was there any way of disrupting his control?

She was surprised at how clearly she was thinking despite her terror. It seemed like a hopeless situation, and yet she was trying to wiggle out of it.

"You're scared. I understand," the teen said. Her eyes darted: involuntary surprise. He noticed. "My name is Gaara. Please, I would like to know yours."

Was there any harm in it? This was a recon, and"Gaara" was clearly a Sunagakure patrol. He was a ninja who used sand as a weapon: what other village could he be a member of, out here? Maybe, if she opened up, Tamako could somehow get some information out of him.

Like if her team was still alive or not.

"Tamako Shirogane," she said. "Are my friends still alive?"

He regarded her placidly. "They are." She had no idea if he was lying. "They will continue to be, so long as you are honest with me."

Tamako stiffened. The soft threat was clear.

She had to get out. Or do as he asked. Could she escape? She had a couple explosive tags in her hip pocket. Could she trigger one of them by extending the Seishingane? She wasn't sure. But if she did, the sand would be blown away. Her steel skin would probably ensure she'd survive the blast. Gaara was close enough that the blast would hit him too, and he didn't have the same protection. She'd have a moment to charge him.

Would it be enough?

"How old are you, Tamako Shirogane?" Gaara asked, and Tamako was yanked out of her head.

"Thirteen."

"Interesting." Gaara rocked on his heels a little, the only overt sign of animation he'd made since stopping in front of her.

"My age?" Tamako asked, trying to sound cold and instead sounding unsure.

"In a way," Gaara softly agreed. "When I was your age, I encountered a remarkable shinobi with a Kekkei Genkai much like yours." He examined her face. "Though, instead of metal, he covered himself in his own bones."

Tamako's face twisted in surprise, drawn into the redhead's sonorous voice despite her mind screaming at her not to let her guard down. "Really? That's…"

"Grotesque, indeed. You're fortunate in comparison to him. He used his own skeleton as a weapon and a shield." Gaara smiled humorlessly. "It was a difficult battle. If not for some luck, he might have ended me."

"Why are you telling me this?" Why _was_ he telling her this?

"It's an amusing coincidence. Despite his impenetrable bones, I was still able to crush him alive." Another humorless smile. "Is yours the only team out here?"

"Uh." Tamako was transfixed by visions of herself bursting like a grape, squeezed from all sides by Gaara's sand. Of the same happening to the rest of her team. "Yes."

 _That_ was why he had been telling her. The redhead had seen right through her. He'd seen what she'd been planning. She knew it, as sure as the color of the sky. She'd just been told, in a roundabout way, what would happen to her if she tried something stupid.

"Good. You are from Iwagakure."

Tamako didn't hesitate: her situation was clearer than ever. The thought of the exploding tag in her pocket quietly slipped away.

"Yes."

"A recon team to ascertain the perimeter of Sunagakure." Gaara looked up and away, towards the horizon. "With genin." He looked back. "Did the Tsuchikage recommend your team for this mission?"

"He recommended several teams of genin," Tamako said, thinking of her friends trapped down in the cold, dark sand beneath her. Hideaki must have been panicking: he hated small spaces. "We were the ones that accepted."

"Hmm." Gaara looked past her eyes. "That was foolish of you." He frowned. "Onoki believes I am soft."

Tamako shook, not fully understanding what he was saying. Gaara was talking as though he knew the Tsuchikage personally, calling him by his first name. Perhaps it was just another aspect of his commanding tone: Gaara spoke with polite, clear authority. Maybe he was just the kind of ninja who dared to say the first name of foreign Kage.

But that didn't explain why Onoki would be thinking of him in particular when he sent a recon team.

A quiet realization bubbled up in Tamako's mind, but her throat was too constricted to voice it.

"Well, he's half right, at least," Gaara admitted. "You've been very cooperative. I'm not especially inclined to kill you."

Gaara stood up, and made a small gesture with his right hand. Gradually, Tamako rose out of the ground, slowly coming free of the sand. Simultaneously, three mounds in the sand became clear. With eerie grace, Tamako's team was vomited up by the desert.

They weren't moving.

"Do not worry. They're merely unconscious," Gaara said. "I allowed them to breath after they passed out." He gestured at Yui, who lay on her back, breathing shallowly. Her hair was full of sand. As he did, Tamako's feet finally came free. "Go to your sensei. Slowly."

Tamako did, her feet crunching on the sand. She was too distracted to focus on gliding over it.

"Wake her up," Gaara commanded. Tamako bent over, placing her hand on Yui's shoulder.

"Sensei, wake up," she practically begged, sending a jolt of chakra through her teacher's system. Yui's eyes flew open and she exploded to her feet, nearly knocking Tamako over. She spun around, her eyes taking in the situation in an instant.

"Oh my," she said, somehow sounding unruffled despite being unarmed and covered in sand. "The Kazekage. _Excellent_."

Tamako blinked. She couldn't have heard that correctly. That would be ridiculous.

"Ah, you recognize me," Gaara said, and Tamako stared from her sensei to the Suna-nin. No, the _Kazekage_.

' _Oh no.'_

"You're very distinctive. As are your abilities. Though…" Yui glanced at her other students, still unconscious. "I had no idea they were so versatile."

"You are a recon team, are you not." Gaara crossed his arms. "It seems you've performed some critical reconnaissance." He glanced at Tamako. "You have a very interesting student. She has quite the Kekkei Genkai."

"Yes, well…" Yui faltered. "Thank you for not killing her, Lord Kazekage."

Gaara nodded. Tamako felt light-headed. "Listen to me carefully, shinobi of Stone." He enunciated every word, as though he were building a wall out of carefully placed syllables. "This will be the last intrusion my village will tolerate. The next ninja of your village that steps foot in the desert will die."

"Are you threatening our village, Kazekage?" Yui asked softly. "You must understand the consequences of that." Gaara nodded.

"Please don't mistake me for impulsive, or petty," Gaara said, his voice resonating with a genuine appeal. Tamako was still trying to wrap her head around the fact she had talked to the Kage of another Village face to face, so his _politeness_ only disconcerted her more. "The Nations are entering a time of insecurity, and I cannot afford any risk to my Village; to my family. So, the laws of this desert will be simple. If you belong here, you will not be harmed."

Tamako shivered, transfixed by the absolute certainty in the voice of a teenager only a few years older than her, a shinobi who commanded one of the Five Villages. Yui glanced at her, but in much the same way as Tamako, she couldn't look away from Gaara for long. Pillars of sand rose, far in the distance, rearing high into the sky. Tamako took a step back.

"Return to the Tsuchikage, and give him those words. Tell him that Gaara of the Desert will suffer no trespass."

Then, without any further ceremony, the Godaime Kazekage collapsed into sand, and the distant pillars with him. The desert was silent once more but for the soft whistling of the endless wind.

"Bunshin. Hmm," Yui said, after a couple seconds had passed. "Tamako, you're alright?"

"I…" Tamako looked to her, and then to herself. "Yeah. I'm alright."

"Good." Yui looked back to where the Kage had been. "He was a bit melodramatic, don't you think?"

Tamako took a deep breath, trying to slow her racing heart. Her teeth hurt. It felt like her heartbeat was shaking them apart. "He was very polite with me, actually. Soft-spoken. I think that was for you, sensei."

"Oh?" Yui asked. "That's interesting. You'll have to debrief me once we're out of here." She turned towards Hideaki, and Tamako understood the cue: she moved towards Takeshi instead.

"He's really just going to let us leave?" she asked, and Yui laughed.

"Yeah. He needs someone to deliver his ultimatum." She bent down over Hideaki, preparing to wake him. "You're a lucky girl, Tamako. Not many genin can say they met a foreign Kage, even one that was just a clone."

"I don't feel very lucky," Tamako mumbled, her head pounding. She tasted vomit on her tongue. Yui laughed once more.

"Maybe not. Now," she said, touching her hand to Hideaki's forehead. "Let's get the hell out of here."


	5. Distance

The Sword in the Stone

Disappearances

Tamako only had a week's rest before she was out of the village once more. Her parents had watched her depart with lips twisted in worry as the wind of Iwagakure had ruffled their hair: she'd been quiet for a day and some after she'd returned, unable to dream about anything but hungry deserts and jade eyes. Her father had noticed, but hadn't asked. Her mother had asked, her eyes filled with deep concern, but Tamako had been unable to explicate the feeling inside her.

It had been a peculiar combination of terror and incandescent joy. Terror for what she thought was obvious reasons. She and her team had nearly been eaten alive by the desert. The Kazekage could have squashed them like bugs if he'd been so inclined. Tamako had never been so close to death. It was only after they'd left the Land of Wind behind, when the endless howling of the desert had been replaced by the sound of the mountains and the harsh altitude, that she'd noticed the taste it had left behind in her mouth.

It was like a concoction of ash and salt and dirty hair. It stuck to her tongue and wormed its way up into her brain. When Tamako had finally made it home, she'd brushed her teeth incessantly, three times in one day. The taste hadn't left, and her inability to dislodge it at only made it stronger.

She hadn't been able to explain the sensation to her family, and so she'd settled for pretending as though the mission had been completely without incident. But her parents had noticed, even if Kei hadn't, and that had rankled her.

Tamako could tell her teammates felt the same way. They had barely spoken to each since returning. It worried Tamako. Around the village, she often saw genin teams together in their free time: laughing, talking, eating, training as one. But her team wasn't like that. They were friendly with each other, obviously. Tamako didn't have issue with Takeshi or his family, despite their incessant… Takeshi-ness. Hideaki was an orphan, and Tamako had spent some time in the apartment provided to him by the village, but only the one time. She and her team very rarely spent time together outside of missions.

And as for Yui… Yui was elusive at best, and the latest mission hadn't changed that.

Which was why, on a mountain pass a couple miles from their destination, Tamako felt a peculiar urge to ask one of her teammates something personal. _Anything_. The realization of how fragile they all were vibrated up and down her spine, something almost like pain.

"Hey, Hideaki." The words were out before she had full control over them, and Tamako viciously resisted going red. They passed right over a ravine, leaping clear over 20 meters of dark water and scrubs. Tamako wondered when she'd stopped being amazed she could do that. Her teammate looked back at her over his shoulder. "How was your weekend?"

"Umm." For the first time Tamako had ever seen, Hideaki looked like he didn't quite know what to say. The squat dark boy looked from her to Takeshi, who shrugged, and then back. "It was fine."

"Did you do anything interesting?" Tamako couldn't stop the blush this time. It felt humiliating, but she pressed forward nonetheless.

"Not really, I suppose," Hideaki said, looking forward once more. "Mostly read."

"What'd you read?" Takeshi offered. This time, it was Yui who looked back at the rest of them. Tamako couldn't recognize her expression.

"Hrm." Hideaki produced an odd, indecisive noise. "A history book."

"Really?" Takeshi made a face. "You read that kinda stuff out of school?" Another first: Hideaki made a face back.

Tamako smiled. "What kind of history, Hideaki? About the Villages?"

Hideaki nodded. "Yeah. Nothing especially exciting, of course. I was just curious about…" He hesitated. "Well, about Sunagakure."

"Oh?" Yui suddenly joined the conversation. "And what were you able to find?"

"Not much." At Yui's silent signal, the team dropped much of their speed, slowing to a walk as they moved through a canyon stuffed with rocks and moss. "But that's no surprise, is it sensei?"

"Nope." Yui gingerly stepped over a particularly damp patch of striking red moss. "They aren't called Hidden Villages for nothing. Information about them is pretty intensely policed. Hunter-nin are very good at their job, after all, so it's uncommon for rogues to spread knowledge. Secrets are jealously guarded in every way, and you'd be surprised at what could be defined as a secret."

"Sounds about right," Takeshi said cheerfully. "Can't have guys just walking off with kinjutsu and crap, right?"

"Definitely no," Yui laughed. "Though... you guys wouldn't know it, something just like that happened about, oh, nine years ago."

"What, in Iwagakure?" Takeshi asked, flabbergasted. Tamako just felt a silent growing concern.

"Heh, yeah," Yui said. "You guys would have been real young, but maybe you remember that day in April when a couple barracks got blown up? 'Training exercise gone wrong'?"

Tamako's teammates shook their heads, but Tamako frowned instead. She clawed deep into her head, drawing out the vague memories of explosions and shouting. "Yeah," she muttered, and Yui nodded with approval. "I was out on my balcony." She blinked. "I saw it. Wow. I'd completely forgotten."

"Little things," Yui said, and Takeshi guffawed.

"Yeah," he snickered, "like explosions."

Hideaki grinned at that, and Tamako was struck by how incongruous the warm look was with his wide face.

"Well, anyway," Yui continued. "That wasn't a training exercise."

"Someone stole a kinjutsu?" Hideaki was the one to raise the rhetorical question.

"Yup," Yui said. "From the Explosion Corps, so you know they were nuts." Tamako was forced to agree; stealing from people who could turn you into a bomb with their bare hands definitely wasn't a healthy thing to do. "Though the crazy part was that they actually made it out of the village." She scratched her chin. "Then again, since they _did_ make it out, was it crazy to do in the first place?"

"Yes," Takeshi said flatly. Tamako laughed.

"What happened to them?" Hideki asked, and Yui slightly sobered.

"They're dead," she said. Tamako hadn't expected a different answer.

"They were captured by Hunter-nin?" Hideaki pressed further, and Yui raised an eyebrow.

"Nope. He blew up everyone who came after him, actually." Their sensei laughed, and Tamako felt a little sick at the sound. "Nobody thought he would last the rest of the year, but he did, and the year after that."

"Then who killed him?" Tamako asked. Yui narrowed her eyes.

"Well, you didn't hear it from me," she said, and Tamako's team nodded, Takeshi's face screwed up in comical solemnity.

"A ninja from Konoha," she said, and Tamako blinked. "The fun part is that he was ostensibly a rogue too at the time, though the top guys are inclined to think that was just a cover nowadays."

"People do that? Pretend to go rogue?" Takeshi asked, and Yui snorted.

"Yeah, that's a pretty basic tactic, buddy," she said, the words not stinging as much as they should. "Still, that was a weird case. It was lucky that he got taken out like that, another village handling the problem, but still…" She cracked a knuckle. "I don't like it, but that's just me."

"No, that makes sense," Hideaki said. "Stone should take care of Stone's problems."

Yui offered him a smile. "You never did tell us what you did learn about Sand, Hideaki," she said, tactfully switching the subject. The squat boy shrugged.

"Stuff about their Kage. Puppet tactics. You were right about them being scary, sensei. I found a journal from a Jounin in the First War: apparently he was one of the first Iwa-nin to meet the Puppet Corp in an open battle." Hideaki wasn't looking at them anymore. His eyes darted minutely, as though he were reading words right before him. "He was a in a forest. One of his unit took what they thought was an enemy sentry hostage. The hostage split open at the waist and cut the man in half, and then filled the area with poison and retreated back to its master. By the end of the night everything for a kilometer around had rotted."

"Jeez," Takeshi muttered. "So that's what you meant by history books."

"Plenty of material along those lines," Hideaki said. "It's interesting. Each of the Kazekage has had powers appropriate for defending their village. The First had command of tornadoes, the Second was instrumental in creating much of the Puppetry techniques that empower Sunagakure today, and the Third and Fourth both had control over the environment…" He frowned. "Just like the Fifth, it appears."

"You may not have found this in any of your books," Yui said, "but the Fourth was the Fifth's father." Yui's eyes shone with something. Admiration? "His youth was no barrier to taking up his mantle."

"I also learned that every Kazekage so far has been assassinated," Hideaki said softly. "Not unusual, but interesting."

"Heh." Takeshi laced his fingers behind his head. "Maybe we'll get lucky and that won't change."

Tamako felt a pang at that. "He didn't kill us," she pointed out. "That's something."

"Yeah, he had a nice conversation with you," Takeshi said. "I mean, I was kinda suffocating at the time, but I'm sure you were having a great time."

Not a pang anymore. A spike of cold irritation. "I wasn't-!"

"Hey." Yui's voice shut the two of them down instantly. "Chill. Tamako got lucky: we all did."

"Yeah…" Takeshi grumbled. "Sorry, Tamako."

"It's okay. Just…" she started to say, before realizing she didn't know how to finish the sentence. "It's okay."

They walked in silence until Yui spoke once more.

"We're almost there. Remember, everyone on your best behavior."

"What's this place called again, sensei?" Takeshi asked, unlacing his fingers. They were reaching the end of the canyon. Tamako could see the exit up ahead, opening up onto a brilliant valley. The clear sky only accented the effect, providing a striking contrast to the sea of green forests and deep blue lakes. For just a moment, Tamako's breath was stolen by the vista.

Hideaki pointed southeast with a lackadaisical nod. Tamako could see his target, a couple miles away: a sprawling urban town, dominated by tall concrete and glass structures, taller than any of its kind she'd ever seen before. One in particular sat on the western edge of the town, its countless windows shining in the midday sun.

"Karuizawa," Hideaki said, the name oddly elegant coming from him. "You know, a lot of nobles spend their time here, sensei." He lowered his hand. "The Daimyo met and courted his current wife here." Tamako recalled a portrait of the Land of Earth's Daimyo. She couldn't picture the dark man with dour eyes and a neatly groomed beard 'courting' someone. Executing them, maybe.

"How do you _know_ this stuff, man," Takeshi groused. Hideaki smiled. "Yeah yeah, don't bother. I know."

"Well said, Takeshi. And you're right, Hideaki," Yui said. "Lotta high rollers in this place. So like I said: try not to make a fool of yourself, alright?"

"They've got people going missing and we're worried about being rude?" Takeshi asked, and Yui smiled at him.

"Well, that's how it works. They need our help, but they don't like really talking about that. So, they don't bring it up, we don't bring it up, we get paid, everyone's happy."

"Sounds fair," Tamako said, scanning the… town? City? It didn't seem big enough to call a proper city, but it definitely looked like one. Tamako settled on calling it one anyway. "So, who're we meeting?"

"Some woman named Tamako Horigata." Tamako did a doubletake, glancing over her shoulder at her sensei. The woman smiled at her, entirely too happy. "Yeah, I thought it was funny too. To be honest, it's half the reason we're here."

Yui Tono, Tamako suddenly realized, was a huge dork.

"We're supposed to meet her in the 'main market.' I'm sure it won't be that hard to find. She'll be wearing a-" Yui reached into one of her pockets and withdrew a crumpled piece of paper, which she read from with a mocking posh voice. "Very distinctive blue hat." Takeshi laughed at the tone, and Tamako nearly joined in. "A little strange, but hey, she's the client."

"So what're we waiting for?" Takeshi asked. "Let's go!"

And just like that, they set off down the cliff.

* * *

"That can't be her, can it?" Takeshi asked, nudging Hideaki. The smaller boy glanced at him with flat eyes, before drawing Yui's attention with a cough.

"That is indeed a blue hat," he said. Tamako's team had been slowly wandering through the largest market they could find in the city, arrayed in a rough diamond. The market itself had turned out to be a huge open square near the center of the city filled with transient carts and bellowing merchants demanding the attention of every potential customer that had the temerity to walk by without purchasing anything. It was all very familiar to Tamako. Her father was in charge of places with a lot more class than this kind of street-ware, but the principle was the same, even if the language and location changed. The streets were absolutely packed with people of every walk of life: fishermen and miners walked alongside preening nobles. Tamako had bumped shoulders with more kinds people in the last twenty minutes than she'd known all her life, and heard a million disembodied conversations.

' _Twenty thousand Ryo? That's ridiculous!'_

' _No, I'm sure no one will notice.'_

' _I saw one of them today. Looked like a real miserable soul.'_

' _Where am I gonna find a bug that big?'_

' _Can't just let people like that in. The police oughta do something.'_

' _Oh goodness, is that_ genuine _?'_

Eventually, Tamako had given up on following the background noise. There hadn't been anything worth hearing.

"It's a little, uh, obvious, isn't it?" Takeshi asked, licking his lips. He'd been the only one of them to purchase anything during their wanderings. A necklace of smooth obsidian stones hung around his neck, pleasantly dark against his pale skin.

"That _is_ the point, Takeshi," Tamako pointed out. The woman that had drawn her teammates attention was loitering at a stall about twenty meters away, perusing a collection of gorgeous hand-mirrors encrusted with a tasteful number of jewels and a less excusable amount of seashells. She was wearing one of the most remarkable hats Tamako had ever seen.

If Tamako had to describe it, she'd call it the bastard child of a top hat and a peacock. It was bright blue, of course, with a brim that extended out nearly four inches in every direction. It was nearly a foot tall as well, showing above the crowd no matter how many people moved past the woman. Most striking of all, almost every inch of the hat's surface was stuck full of feathers from various exotic birds. It was a forest of iridescent feathers of every color, but the majority of them were a shade between purple and green, enhancing the predominant blue of the hat. If Tamako's eyes weren't deceiving her, the crown was even adorned by three Rumblebird tail-feathers: her father had brought her one such feather as a gift once, when Tamako was quite young, and joked that if anyone from the Land of Lightning knew he had it, they'd be visited by Kumogakure's hit squads within the week.

The woman's headwear was probably as expensive as Tamako's home. The rest of her clothes were equally extravagant, though none of it stuck out quite as much as the hat. Tamako was surprised that it wasn't even the most ridiculous outfit she'd seen since arriving in Karuizawa.

"Yeah, she's definitely it," Tamako said, wondering why on earth such an obviously wealthy client had hired a C-Rank mission. She could certainly afford better. "Who's making contact?"

"You are!" Yui was quite suddenly behind her: Tamako hadn't heard her approach, and it was only when her teacher's voice was accompanied by a tap on the shoulder that she turned back. "Much as I'd _love_ to ask about that amazing thing," Yui said, her eyes locked on the hat, "some more experience would be nice." Tamako's teacher was munching on some sort of fried treat, and she took a contemplative bite of it as she regarded their client.

"Why Tamako?" Takeshi asked. He didn't look disappointed, but Tamako was sure he'd wanted to touch the feathers.

"Woman who dress like that take little girls more seriously than little boys," Yui said, and Tamako wondered if her sensei wasn't just making that up as an excuse to see how she would handle this situation. "Besides, I don't want you accidentally offending her or something."

"Hmph." Takeshi almost pouted. "Fine. You want us on lookout, then?"

Yui nodded, and Takeshi and Hideaki moved off, taking up perimeter positions. Her sensei caught Tamako's uncertain look and gave her a wink before joining the boys in creating a perimeter for the meeting.

Tamako watched her as she left, and then turned back to the woman in the ridiculous hat.

' _Get it over with.'_

She took a deep breath, and with as straight a posture as she could manage, walked straight towards the woman.

"Stop." The man didn't appear from nowhere, as Yui had, but his approach was still sudden enough that Tamako was impressed with how quickly he'd shifted from blending in with the crowd to interspersing himself. She'd barely made it five meters before he'd blocked her.

Tamako scanned him with a glance: workmanlike clothes, mostly black and grey. Thick boots. Early, mid-thirties, thick mustache. Her eyes wandered over his waist. Two weapons, both concealed in folded cloth but easy to draw. A short sword and perhaps a dagger. The way he was standing implied another, either in his boot or the small of his back. No markings. His hands were covered in calluses. A small cut on one knuckle, shallow, all but healed.

Private security, perhaps a little training in chakra. He folded his arms, standing a foot and a half taller than her. Tamako could tell he thought it looked intimidating. She scanned her surroundings, taking another half-second, and picked out five more men just like him, all doing their best to keep an eye on her and her team. Seemed about right.

"I'm here to speak to Tamako Horigata," she said calmly, a small smile escaping at the name. The man didn't look impressed.

"Why?" he asked. Tamako tapped her hitai-ate, nearly hidden by her hair, and slipped aside a bang to reveal the symbol of Iwagakure. The man didn't make an overt move, though he did raise one eyebrow.

"She hired us," Tamako said. "Now please, may I speak to her?"

"Hmph." The man stepped aside, but as Tamako continued forward he kept pace with her. She hadn't expected anything else. Tamako Horigata looked up as she approached, her eyes narrowing.

"My," she said. She placed the hand mirror she'd been examining back down on the polished wooden counter she'd plucked it from. "I hadn't expected the Village Hidden in the Stone to send someone so… young."

Tamako considered the situation. A handshake was out of the question. She didn't want to make a sign of deference either; a curtsy wouldn't be appropriate, and her team would never let her live it down. She settled for inclining her head, clasping her hands behind her back. She summoned up old lessons her father had taught her for the occasional meetings with dignitaries.

"Your request was marked as a C-Rank, ma'am. My team was deemed appropriate," she said.

The woman looked her up and down, tapping her finger on her chin. "Well, I'm glad you were able to find me." She glanced up. "I hope the hat was distinctive enough."

Tamako smiled. "Oh, yes ma'am. We had no doubt." The woman smiled at her: it was a kind look, with perfect teeth. Tamako Horigata was a beautiful woman, Tamako recognized. Flawless skin and delicate features, but she didn't possess the fragility of many people in her class.

"I trust you've been told the basics," Horigata said. Tamako couldn't place her accent. It certainly wasn't from the Land of Earth, which surprised her. Then again, cities like this attracted all kinds of people.

"Several people have gone missing within the city," she recited. "We're to find out what happened to them."

"Indeed." Tamako looked off into the distance. "The last to vanish was my daughter. When the local satrap refused my requests, I decided to involve shinobi."

Satrap? Tamako didn't recognize the term. The woman definitely wasn't from around here. "Why did he refuse?" she asked, before correcting herself. "Ma'am."

The woman's face curled in contempt. "Appearance. You shinobi can certainly be quiet, but it's bad for business to have you creeping about looking for something, apparently." She twisted her foot, as if grinding something under her dark stiletto heels. "I suppose he is more concerned with the city's profits than a couple missing tourists."

"Oh." Tamako didn't know what to say. "I'm sorry to hear that."

"Do not give me apologies," the woman said, waving away Tamako's words. "Find whoever is responsible." She glanced down, her cold blue eyes affixing Tamako's own. "I hope your village was right to send… you."

Tamako stared back, bristling internally at the implied insult. Without a conscious decision, steel spread around her eyes. She felt the sudden warmth, and embarrassment rippled through her chest.

But the older woman didn't notice Tamako's embarrassment. She stared at the steel around Tamako's eyes, nonplussed.

"Interesting," she said, smiling with too many of her too-white teeth. "My daughter vanished somewhere near a restaurant on the west side of the city, two days ago: it's called…" she pursed her lips. " _The Valiant Cod_ , I believe. You and your team should start there." Her face fell microscopically, but Tamako noticed the drop with her enhanced perception.

"How can we contact you?"

The woman smiled again. "I'm sure your teacher will be able to find me if she needs to." She nodded towards Yui. "Seems like a perceptive woman. Now please." She inclined her head, to Tamako's shock.

"Be swift."

With that, she spun away with an imperious turn that seemed impossible with such a cumbersome hat upon her head, and strode off into the market. Her bodyguards followed her at a distance; the one who had stopped Tamako earlier gave her an unsure look. Tamako looked back to her sensei, and shrugged.

* * *

"Jeez this is some good fish." Takeshi spoke with his mouth open. Frequently. It was just another ultimately inconsequential thing about him that grated on Tamako: something not worth building animosity over, but that irritated her nonetheless.

Yui was clearly having similar thoughts. She flicked her student in the forehead and he rocked back in surprise, almost choking. "Hey," she chided. "Manners." Then she dug into her own meal with unladylike enthusiasm, tearing a chunk off the roasted tentacle.

 _The Valiant Cod_ wasn't much to look it. Tamako was surprised the daughter of someone so obviously wealthy had eaten there. The establishment was a small corner restaurant, with enough seating for perhaps thirty patrons. The walls were festooned with images and taxidermies of fish. There were all sorts of specimen, even a particularly large shark-like creature hanging over the entryway. It had surprised Tamako when they'd walked under it, but now it just seemed somewhat pitiful. Its small eyes, a smoky color, leered out of his rictus face; the innumerable triangle teeth glued in its slack jaw were dull in the warm light of the restaurant.

"Only one exit," Hideaki noted. He sipped at his water, his eyes scanning everyone in the building. "If she was abducted around here, it would have been out on the street. Too many people to see it in here… unless it was late."

"So?" Tamako asked. "That just narrows it down to that street, and then any street connected to it. That's not-"

"You're right, Tamako," Yui cut in. She really could put octopus away with frightening speed. "But it _does_ narrow it down. Listen." She scooted forward and leaned her head over the table, and her students did as well, listening intently. "What we know so far paints a pretty specific profile. A young lady abducted, among several others. However, not all the abductees have been young or female, so that removes some obvious proclivities."

Tamako felt something cold squirm up into her stomach and shoved it away.

"Young, male, female. No one over the age of fifty, though that may just be coincidence. From all walks of life." Yui took a gulp of the fruity concoction she'd ordered.

"Sensei, how'd you find this all out?" Hideaki asked, and Yui winked.

"I've got my ways," she said. Tamako wondered what those ways could be. Their sensei had only been out of their sight for an hour since they'd arrived, and she'd found out that much?

"Anyway, it's an equal opportunity grabber," Yui said with a grin. "That points to a pretty specific thing: serial killer."

"What, someone just..." Takeshi said, looking puzzled. "Just killing a bunch of people for no reason? What's the point?"

"It's more common than you would think," Hideaki said quietly. "Not within the Villages, of course, but outside of them... " He pursed his lips. "Most such predators are not shinobi, however. If that's the case, whoever we are looking for could be anyone in the city. Or they could have departed already."

"Why would they leave after a couple victims, and not the first? Plus, they might not be killing people," Tamako pointed out, poking at her own food: some sort of fried fish. "Just abducting?"

"Hmm. That's a lot trickier," Yui pointed out. "But right now, there's not much of a functional difference. We can worry about the details later. We've got to get started first."

"So what do we do?" Takeshi asked.

"Well, I didn't bring you guys here just for the food," Yui said. "If someone goes missing and a body doesn't turn up, you talk to the people who saw them last. Y'know, _witnesses_."

"Oh." Hideaki turned, looking back towards the open kitchen, which looked out on the rest of the restaurant. Tamako could see several chefs toiling back there, chopping, boiling. One laughed at something the woman next to him had said. "So the staff. That will be difficult without a-"

Yui reached into one of the folds of her shirt and removed a thin laminated picture, delicately flipping it over so Tamako and Takeshi could see it. It was a photo of a pretty young woman with sheer cheekbones and chilly blue eyes. It only took a glance for Tamako to see the similarities between her and the woman she'd spoken to in the market.

"You're trying way too hard, sensei," Takeshi laughed, leaning back. Yui smiled.

"Well hey, I like impressing you guys," she said. "My friends don't even blink at stuff like that. It's kinda a downer sometimes."

Tamako grinned. "So what, we just ask them if they remember her? What if they weren't working here that day?"

"Then we track down their coworkers," Yui shrugged. "Let's hope we get lucky though. That could be awkward. Now." She looked at Takeshi. "You wanna do it?"

"What, just ask them?" he asked.

"And show them the picture!" Tamako said. Despite the gravity of their mission, she was still enjoying herself: she was in an interesting place with great food. Even with a probable murder on the mind, she let herself take pleasure in the novelty.

Takeshi gave Yui an uncertain look, but nevertheless plucked the photo from her hand and slid out of his chair. He walked towards the kitchen like a lost boy looking for his mother, and eventually grabbed one of the staff's attention. It was an older man with salt-white hair and substantial stubble. As he eyed Takeshi curiously, Tamako turned back to her sensei.

"So what's Hideaki gonna have to do?" she asked, half joking, and Yui blinked.

"Pardon?" she asked, and Tamako tilted her head towards Takeshi.

"You made me talk to, uh, Tamako," she said, forcing her own name out after a momentary mental hiccup. "You're making Takeshi interrogate the staff. So what's Hideaki gonna do?"

Yui tapped her finger on her lower lip. "Catch the killer, I guess," she said, too deadpan for Tamako to tell if she was being serious.

"I do not have much experience in that, sensei," Hideaki said, echoing Yui's tone. Tamako felt a grin tug at her mouth. "I suppose everyone must start somewhere."

"Well, when they find them, I guess Hideaki has dibs," Tamako said, and Yui nodded authoritatively.

"It's only fair," she agreed. "After all-"

"Hey, sensei." Takeshi had returned to the table with someone in tow: the pretty young lady who Tamako has seen make one of her coworkers laugh. He pointed his thumb at her over his shoulder. "This one says she remembers her."

"Oh?" Yui asked. The woman nodded.

"First off, my name isn't 'this one,'" she said with an irritated glance at Takeshi. "It's Airi. And I do recognize that woman, yes. She was in here two days ago." She looked between Tamako, Hideaki, and Yui. "What'd she do to piss off a bunch of shinobi? She was a bit haughty, but I wouldn't have figured…"

"She's gone missing," Yui said, and the woman blinked, momentary shock plain on her face. "And we're here to locate her." Tamako's sensei steepled her hands. "You may have been the last person to see her."

"Oh, wow." Airi fidgeted, picking at one of her fingers. "Well she was in here, uh, Thursday. Early afternoon, that would be around, um, three, I think."

"Was she with anyone?" Yui pressed in. Tamako had to admire how she kept the woman off balance. Airi shook her head.

"No, alone. She didn't get that much to eat: just drank a lot." She narrowed her eyes, momentarily looking off as if to remember something in the corner of her mind. "She left around five. I got the door for her. She said, uh…" Airi scratched the nape of her neck. "That I had a sweet face, and she'd get some mochi for me. And then she just left."

"Huh." Yui leaned back. "Pretty drunk, then." Airi just nodded. "You didn't think she might need help getting home?"

"The city's pretty safe, and she wasn't falling over her feet or anything," Airi said quickly, her face going a little red. "There were people everywhere in the street. This isn't a bad part of town."

"Relax." Yui smiled. "Are there any mochi places about here? Especially one a tourist woulda known about?"

"Sure, there's on at the end of the street. If she knew about it, and she was actually getting some, she'd have been heading there." Airi rubbed her arms. "That's really all I remember."

Yui looked between all of her genin: Tamako knew she wasn't the only one with an uncertain look. "Well, thank you for your time, Airi," she eventually said. The woman inclined her head, and then uncertainly went back to the kitchen, clearly ready to endure another barrage of questions not from shinobi but from her coworkers.

"Well, that sucked," Takeshi said, thumping down into his chair. Hideaki crossed his arms.

"She didn't have much information," he agreed. "This will not be easy, with so few leads."

Tamako almost expressed her agreement out loud. Hideaki was right, of course. In a city of tens of thousands, finding a single person, or even an accomplice or two, with such tenuous information would be almost impossible, even for shinobi. They could have to wait for the target to strike again, or even worse go home empty-handed: a stain on Iwagakure's reputation, and their own skills.

But she didn't say any of that out loud, because unlike her teammates Tamako was watching her sensei's face. In their time together, Tamako had picked up on certain ticks from Yui: when she was nervous (which was exceptionally rare) she scratched at the nape of her neck. When she was thinking, she bit her lip. Right now, Yui was doing both.

"Sensei?" Tamako asked, and Yui snapped to attention. Her hand fell away from her neck. "What is it?"

"Well, you guys are right, she didn't give us much," Yui admitted. "Except one thing."

"Oh?" Takeshi leaned forward, elbows on the table.

"C'mon, you didn't notice?" Yui asked, and Takeshi's face twisted. "Any of you?"

"Ah," Hideaki said, like a bubble had just popped next to his ear. "The street."

"Exactly," Yui said. Takeshi still looked confused. "You get it?"

Tamako suddenly realized what Hideaki meant. "She left at five, and the street was full of people." Tamako cocked her head. "But she never made it back, and there's nothing too shady between here and where she was staying. So…"

"So she got nabbed in broad daylight, in the middle of a city, and no one came to the police about it," Yui said. "Which implies two things. Anyone who saw it was complicit, or too scared to come forward…"

"Or no one noticed." Takeshi finally clued in. "Huh. Maybe she ran off?"

"Yeah, just like everyone else who vanished," Tamako said, and Takeshi laughed, acknowledging his slip-up. "So if she vanished in the middle of the day, in the middle of the city…"

"We probably aren't dealing with a normal killer or kidnapper," Yui said.

"Why's kidnapping back on the table?" Takeshi asked, and Yui arched an eyebrow.

"Because several people being kidnapped by a shinobi in such a short amount of time is a bit more believable than a civilian managing it," she said, and Takeshi nodded wisely.

"I gotcha, I gotcha," he said. "So is that what we're going with now? Some rogue shinobi is nabbing random people?"

"Not necessarily rogue," Tamako pointed out. "They could be working for another nation." She drummed her fingers on the table, her meal forgotten. "Maybe there's more connecting the missing people than anyone noticed?"

"It's worth looking into," Yui said. She cracked her knuckles. "Alright. Everyone, finish up your meals. We're gonna pay the police a visit."

Tamako obeyed her sensei, dutifully picking the last bits of fried fish off her plate. The motion was more mechanical than anything. Her mind was occupied by speculation.

A shinobi was different than a civilian perpetrator, for obvious reasons. They could be doing this for reasons of international import, though on a mission like this they probably weren't of very high rank. Still, a tiny tick of worry picked at Tamako. Civilians weren't a threat to her or her teammates.

A ninja could be. Even with Yui, from here on out they would have to be more careful.


	6. Context

The Sword of Stone

The Tic  


"You're way too good to us, sensei." Tamako could tell Takeshi meant it with all his heart: it wasn't every day you got your own room in a rather nice hotel, and the food Yui had provided as well wasn't anything to scoff at. Tamako felt like half her memories of Karuizawa would revolve around the food she'd found there. So far all of it had been delicious, and even better she hadn't had to buy any of it herself.

"Ah, not really," Yui said with a laugh. "You'd be surprised at how much money a jonin can end up making."

' _Apparently enough to put four people in the best hotel in town for the night,_ ' Tamako thought. Well, maybe it wasn't the _best_ hotel: that could be an exaggeration. But Tamako and her team had found themselves at the steps of a massive building after their frustrating meeting with the local police. A five story building with enormous, beautiful windows and an entryway that oozed class: spotless tile floor, cool marble pillars framing the front door, and a lovely common room festooned with disgustingly fluffy couches and professional tables. The man at the front desk had regarded them somewhat dubiously, until Yui had produced a disgusting amount of cash. At that point, he'd been too happy to give them the best rooms in the place. He'd babbled about the amount of new arrivals in the city while he was doing it, and asked if they were with some of the others. Yui had given a disinterested answer. Tamako hadn't paid much mind.

The meeting with the police had been less productive than Tamako had hoped. They'd been directed to an exhausted looking officer with a thick grey mustache, tired beetle-black eyes, and a surprisingly long sword strapped to his back who'd introduced himself as Soichiro. Though he hadn't been ecstatic at the concept of shinobi potentially taking over his job, he'd walked them through the details of each missing person, augmenting whatever knowledge Yui had picked up (however she had done that: Tamako still had no idea). To everyone's disappointment, their initial impressions had held steady. Soichiro had been on the case since the first missing report, two weeks ago, and with each new person he'd been just as desperate as them to draw a connection.

And just like Yui, he'd found the task impossible. The targets truly seemed to be random. If there was any connection between them, it was one entirely invisible to the outsider. They shared no names, business ventures, defining physical features, nationalities, nothing.

It was enough to make Tamako grind her teeth. Bad enough that someone, likely a shinobi, was targeting civilians like this. They had to do it completely at random and make their job that much harder.

"Well, c'mon," Yui said. "You guys enjoy the food: we gotta go over what we've got so far."

"Probably a shinobi grabbing random people for no apparent reason. There, did it," Takeshi said, popping a shrimp in his mouth. Tamako stifled a laugh. Takeshi made a face and spat something into his hand. "Crap, forgot the tail."

"Yes, thank you Takeshi," Yui said with a grimace. "Anyone else?"

"We know that people started going missing two weeks ago. Fifteen days, precisely," Hideaki offered, and Yui nodded.

"Exactly," she said. "Glad someone's been paying attention, Hideaki. With an accurate timescale, our investigation becomes that much easier."

"Wonder what changed in the last couple weeks," Tamako wondered. Yui glanced at her. "You know, that started the disappearances."

"Someone unscrupulous might've shown up in town," their sensei offered. "Or someone who'd been here for a while, living low, coulda snapped. Weirder things have happened."

"Yeah, I guess so," Tamako agreed. Still, something was nagging at her about the number of days. She shoved it back, not out of her mind, but where it could wait for later. She wasn't going to get anything forcing it.

"So what, are we putting a cap on this for today?" Takeshi asked, snatching another shrimp from the food-laden tray sitting on the table in the middle of the room. Yui shrugged.

"We're not going to find anything with what we've got now," she said. "I don't see why we can't treat ourselves a little."

The room Yui had got for them was definitely the kind of place one did that sort of thing. For one, it was massive: Tamako didn't know the exact dimensions, but the high ceiling, bright colors, plentiful furniture, and luxurious carpet all came together to create a brilliant picture of expensive leisure. The room didn't have any beds: those were in separate rooms, six of them, each of which was connected to the main one by a thick sliding door. Tamako hadn't gotten a great look at them, but they'd seemed just as great as the main one.

This was the kind a place her father stayed while he did business in in foreign countries, Tamako thought: not really a place genin stayed. But she wasn't going to turn it down.

"Ahh." Takeshi made a noise like a decompressing cushion as he flopped down on one of the couches, a bright green one with entirely too many pillows. "I could get used to this."

"Don't," Yui said. "I'm not made out of money. You wanna stick around places like this, you grow up like me." She smiled, but not in a kind way; for a moment, Tamako saw an aspect of her teacher she never had before. "Actually, try to avoid that." As Yui spoke, she rubbed the nape of her neck.

"Oh yeah?" Takeshi asked, leaning forward. "What's the secret, sensei?" He made a face. "I gotta design my own outfit, don't I?" Tamako snorted.

"That helps," Yui deadpanned. She reached to her side, picking up a glass of dark liquid she'd been drinking from. "Actually, it kind of does help. You work a little on looking unique, clients remember you. You might get repeat work that way. It's happened for me once or twice."

"What, really?" Tamako asked. Her sensei nodded seriously, taking a sip of her drink.

"Lots of ninja try not to worry about that sort of thing," Yui said. "It's not even close to necessary. But like I said, it can help." She snapped her fingers, reaching into a fold at her hip and withdrawing a small, well worn book. Its whole surface was featureless grey, and it looked like nothing more than a tiny personal journal.

"Bingo book," Yui announced, and both of Tamako's teammates perked up a little. Tamako did as well: reading about famous ninja was exciting, in a way. Yui flipped through the book, thumbing through page after page as though she knew exactly where she was headed. Tamako realized she actually did have a specific entry in mind when her sensei stopped with a quiet "Aha."

She turned the book around, showing it around the room to each of her students in turn. Tamako was the last. Like all the pages in a bingo book, the actual content was a little sparse. It was nothing more than an identifying headshot, often stolen from the home village, and a small paragraph identifying their combat abilities and optimal tactics to dealing with them.

"Oh jeez," Takeshi asked. "Is that _spandex_?"

"Indeed it is," Hideaki confirmed, studying the picture with narrow eyes.

"Forget the spandex," Tamako muttered. "Look at those _eyebrows_."

The headshot was probably the least professional Tamako had ever seen: a grown man beaming into the camera, one hand enthusiastically held in a thumbs up. He had strong, dark features, shining black hair shaped into a bowl cut, and the most incredible eyebrows Tamako had ever seen. They were like two capricious caterpillars, thick and black, that had decided to take up permanent residence on the man's forehead. Even more peculiar, everything he was wearing was dark green. Including the spandex.

"Might Gai," Yui said, like the name was supposed to hold some meaning. She tapped the photo forcefully with each syllable. "Konohagakure's premier taijutsu specialist. But as you can see, a lot of clients know him as ' _The Green Beast.'_ "

"Pfffft." Takeshi leaned back into his couch. Tamako had similar reaction, unable to contain a small snort at the name. Only Hideaki remained serious, gazing at the picture of Gai. "I wonder why."

Yui winked at him. "Be glad he can't hear you: he once killed three shinobi with one kick."

That shut Takeshi up. Tamako blinked, unable to believe it.

"Like…" she started to ask. "He kicked three at the same time, or…?"

"Well, I wasn't there, thankfully," Yui said, snapping the book shut and stowing it back in her pocket. "So I just heard the stories. That's the great thing, though. If you're known across the nations as 'The Green Beast,' people won't immediately call bullshit if they hear you killed three more people with one kick than a lot of people ever will."

That managed to worm a laugh out of Takeshi, though he still seemed unsettled. Yui scratched the nape of her neck, and took another drink from her dark glass . "At any rate, I figured that was a good example of what I was talking about. Stand out, and you're more likely to make a good living. Though of course, there's a lot of people who'd say that's exactly what being a ninja _isn't_ about."

"I agree," Hideaki said. He grabbed a glass of some kind of bright juice from the platter. "It's foolish to promote yourself like that. Surely now everyone of note knows of Might Gai's capabilities. That weakens him."

"A little, yes," Yui agreed. "It's a balancing act. I'm sure I'm in there, for example." She tapped the pocket holding the book. "It would be an older picture of me, and with incomplete information, but anyone who's really put work into memorizing their bingo book could recognize me, and know a bit about my jutsu." She pulled out one of her kunai, running her finger over the kanji staining the paper wrapped around it. "That could put me at a disadvantage… but that kind of publicity also means I get the kinda jobs that let me put you brats up in a place like this."

"And thank you for that again, sensei," Tamako said with a smile. "Would you have a name? Like… you know, a title."

"Nah." Yui leaned back, crossing her legs. "I guess I'd like something like "The Vanisher," but…"

"That's an awful name, sensei," Takeshi said solemnly, and both Hideaki and Tamako nodded in agreement, Hideaki sipping at his juice. Yui shrugged.

"I'm working on it," she said flippantly, scratching the nape of her neck once again."I'm sure someone else will come up with something better, worst comes to worst."

"You got an itch, sensei?" Takeshi asked, and the corner of Yui's lip quirked.

"What do you mean, Takeshi?" she asked, her hand dropping. Tamako cocked her head. The way her sensei's fingers fluttered; something was off.

"The back of your neck," Takeshi said, tapping the spot on his own neck. "You've been scratching it all day. Did you get bit or something?"

"No," Hideaki said, and Takeshi glanced at him with a clear question on his face. "Sensei scratches that spot frequently." Yui's hand momentarily tightened into a fist, to Tamako's surprise. It relaxed so quickly it was though the action had never happened, but Tamako knew what she had seen.

"He's right," Yui said, and Tamako nodded, thinking back to their time together. Yui _did_ scratch her neck a lot. Weird. "It's a bit of tic."

"You've always had it?" Tamako asked. She considered herself. Did she have a physical tic like that? She sometimes rubbed her arms, or ran steel chakra through her fingers, but she didn't _think_ she had something that obvious…

"No," Yui said, and Tamako was drawn out of her introspection. "I picked it up about seventeen years ago." She took another sip, the dark liquid in her glass nearly drained.

"No reason?" Takeshi pressed in further. He wiggled his eyebrows a little, his flat forehead making the motion slightly more entertaining than it should have been. "A mole? Maybe a tattoo?" He considered. "Don't think my mom would let me get a tattoo, when I was, uh…"

Yui barked a laugh. "Tattoo," she said, shaking her head like the idea was ridiculous. Her eyes grew a bit more coy. "And you shouldn't go asking a woman's age."

"Hey, I wasn't asking!" Takeshi complained. "I mean, not really, it just kinda-"

"Shut up," Yui said, rolling her eyes, and Takeshi did. "I was just a little younger than you, let's put it that way. You can do the math on that."

"When you got a tattoo?" Hideaki asked. He'd finished most of his drink. Yui smiled.

"Something like that," she said, before hesitating for half a second. Tamako was sure her mind was playing tricks on her: Yui's hand twitched upwards before settling.

"Here." Yui put down her drink and stood up, turning around. She lifted up her ponytail and with her other hand, pulled down the collar of her top an inch or so, exposing more of her neck. Tamako narrowed her eyes.

There was a thin line of kanji whirling down her sensei's back, starting right at the base of her neck and moving below her clothes. It was small and elegant, though an odd place for a tattoo: most people would never see it, especially with what Yui normally wore and how she styled her hair.

"Oh, that's kinda nice sensei," Tamako said, and to her bafflement, Yui chuckled. "Though that's a weird place for…"

Hideaki dropped his drink. The glass hit the carpet with a soft thunk and spilled thick red juice across the material, painting it a deeper crimson than it had been before. Tamako looked over to him: her teammate was transfixed by the symbols on Yui's back. There was the deepest sort of concern on his face, and even a hint of terror. It was the kind of face Tamako imagined Hideaki would wear if a man covered in blood burst in through the window; no, even that wouldn't be enough to disturb her imperturbable teammate. Tamako realized that she'd never really conceived of Hideaki making a face like that. It was like a new color that took no cues from familiar ones. She couldn't have pictured it until seeing it for herself.

Hideaki's expression alone brought a flutter of fear to Tamako's chest. "Hideaki?" she asked, feeling steel chakra racing across her ribs. "What is it?"

"You okay man?" Even Takeshi had been unable to miss Hideaki's obvious anxiety.

"Sensei, that can't be real," Hideaki said, his voice steady. "You'd be dead."

"What can I say?" Yui said, turning around with a shrug. "I'm lucky." She sat down, crossing her legs. Hideaki reached down and picked up his fallen cup, ignoring the stain on the carpet.

"That's not…" he said, and for the first time Tamako had ever seen Hideaki was at a loss for words.

"What, what is it?" Takeshi asked. He glanced at Yui, who smirked back. "Didn't look like anything special to me. Just some kanji…"

Something clicked in Tamako's mind. She'd seen that array of symbols before, hadn't she? She closed her eye, furrowing her brow. Where had it been? A book. A book for sure. At the academy? She dug deeper, and after a moment of frustrating emptiness a phrase floated across her mind.

' _Jutsu Formula.'_

That was it, but not quite. A snip of paper, not the whole thing. Where had-

It came to Tamako in a moment of horrid lucidity. The image on the page, opened in her mind now and in her hands three years ago, burned itself to the forefront of her brain.

' _The Jutsu Formula of the Fourth Hokage, and his distinctive Hiraishin technique. The only such Formula accompanied by a flee on sight order; proximity was too dangerous to merit attempts to destroy."_

"No way," she whispered, and Yui smiled at her.

"Hey, Tamako's got it too," she said. Tamako didn't understand how she could be smiling. She had death, very real and very discriminate, stuck to her neck. "That means you're the last, Takeshi."

"Well, what is it then?" Takeshi asked. "C'mon, at least give me a hint."

Tamako and Hideaki shared a look.

"Uh…" Tamako said. She had no idea what would follow it. Hideaki said nothing at all.

"Not a great hint," Takeshi said flatly, and Yui laughed.

"They're processing," she said, and Takeshi only grew more confused.

"Okay, seriously." He grabbed a bundle of napkins, as well as another shrimp. The first he tossed to Hideaki, who caught them absentmindedly. "Is it a bunch of curses or something? I didn't get a good look."

Yui snapped her fingers. "A _curse_!" she said. "I've heard it called that before, but I'd forgotten it. That's a good word for it."

"Jeez sensei," Takeshi said, popping the shrimp in his mouth, having carefully removed the tail this time. "What'd you do to end up getting cursed?" Tamako resisted to urge to drop her head into her hands.

"Survive meeting the Yellow Flash," Yui said dryly. Takeshi choked, sounding like a cat who'd vomited up a hairball and then decided the world didn't deserve to see it.

"It's the Jutsu Formula for the Hiraishin." Hideaki finally spoke up, his voice as quiet and calm as ever. "Affixed to sensei's neck."

"Holy shi-" Takeshi gagged, his hand rising to his throat as the shrimp he'd thrown in his mouth blocked his airway. He desperately swallowed, the action a clear struggle.

Her teammate had almost become another victim of the Yellow Flash, long after the man was dead.

Tamako coughed, stifling a sudden, inappropriate laugh with some effort.

"How the hell did you end up with that, sensei?" Takeshi asked, his face red. "Is it real?"

"Yeah," Yui said. "It's real. Fortunately now the bastard's dead…" She tapped the back of her neck. "It's just a weird tattoo. Guess he was the jealous sort: he didn't pass it on to anyone else."

"I don't-" Hideaki started to say, before correcting himself. "I wasn't aware anyone who had been marked by the Yellow Flash was still alive, sensei."

"Oh, there are plenty of us," Yui said. Tamako couldn't believe how relaxed she sounded. "Maybe a couple dozen? Wars have a way of being unexpected that way." She frowned. "Umm, causing unexpected things, I mean."

"But it doesn't make sense, Sensei," Tamako asked. "If you were our age…"

"Shinobi your age were sent out all the time in times of war," Yui pointed out. "If they were competent, they were deployed. The conflict too important to act otherwise. I was one of those shinobi: I was on the battlefield when you would have been graduating from the academy."

Tamako suddenly was able to provide context for a hundred niggling things about her sensei that had bothered her from the day they'd met. The way she acted, held herself: why Tamako got the impression that training a team was the last thing she'd expected. Yui Tono was a child of war.

"And that's where you met the Yellow Flash?" Takeshi asked, awestruck. Yui smiled coyly at him.

"What, do you want a story of it?" she asked. Takeshi seemed frozen, desperate to ask for more details and yet undeniably aware of how… impertinent it would be. Tamako felt the same way. Yui suddenly seemed so much _more_ , a living part of the Village's history, part of the myths they'd all grown up with. But the way she acted, without bitterness or terror, decoupled her from the legends of Iwagakure's past.

"Well, you'd be disappointed." Yui crossed her arms. "I don't have an exciting story."

"But you do have _a_ story," Takeshi said. Tamako found herself nodding in agreement, leaning forward to hear what her sensei had to say.

Yui narrowed her eyes, weighing something. "Any other day, I'd slap you for pushing so hard," she said, and Takeshi physically retreated several inches. "But you all were bound to find out eventually."

"So what, did you fight him?" Takeshi asked. Yui laughed.

"No," she said, shaking her head. She was still laughing, just a little, but Tamako heard something under the laughter, and she knew her teammates did as well. That bitterness Yui had been missing before was there, hidden in every line of her body. Takeshi had brought it out.

"No," Yui said again. "I never even saw him."

She leaned forward, resting her elbow on her knee and propping her chin up. "I was with a recon team, three guys I wasn't too friendly with and one that I was. We were scouting out the Lightning Canyons-"

"Lightning canyons?" Takeshi asked.

"Hey, if you're gonna be interrupting, don't expect me to be keeping this up," Yui said, pointing an accusing finger at him. "You kids are lucky, y'know."

"Lightning Canyons," Hideaki said. "A series of canyons between The Land of Wind and Fire that are renown for a bizarre atmospheric phenomena: a confluence of high-energy events from the weather and underground thermal vents which causes the production of ball lightning."

There was a pause. Yui cocked an eyebrow.

"What?" Tamako asked.

"Canyon full of weird lightning, no one knows exactly why," Yui said. "Don't worry too much about it. Point was, we'd gotten reports about another squad busy with another mission spotting some shinobi moving through them, and we'd been sent to follow up and establish numbers, composition, the usual boring stuff."

"Did you find them?" Tamako asked.

"Nah," Yui said. "We wandered through the place for an hour… well, wandered isn't the right word, we were being sneaky, obviously. Point is, we did a lot of looking and didn't find anything. We got found instead."

She closed her eyes. "It only made sense to me in hindsight. At the time, everything went too fast." Opened them. "Listen. You kids have been lucky. You've met someone who was completely out of your league, and he let you guys go."

Tamako understood in a moment she was referring to the Kazekage.

"Well, what happened to me was sorta like that. In fact, I ended up a lot like Tamako." She gestured to Tamako, who felt something cold run down her spine. "But my team wasn't sitting under the sand." Takeshi coughed, a sound between a laugh and a groan. "One second we were all moving in formation. I blinked, I heard a gasp, and someone slapped me in the back of the head. When I turned around, everyone was gone."

Tamako could see it in her mind's eye: Yui and her team creeping through a rock formation, before suddenly they vanished, ripped away faster than even her imagination could perceive: Yui's frightened eyes, the same eyes Tamako's had had in the deserts of the Land of Wind, darting around, looking for assurance. It was too easy to put herself in her sensei's place.

"Now, like I said, after that happened I had no idea what the hell was happening," Yui said. "You guys might think I was dumb for not immediately thinking 'holy shit the Yellow Flash', but at that moment, that didn't even cross my mind: I was alive, after all, and as far as I knew the Yellow Flash never left people alive."

"Wait." Takeshi asked. " _Was_ your team dead?"

"Before they knew what happened," Yui said, and Takeshi face grew glum.

"So, you're alone in potential enemy territory," Yui continued. "Your team just disappeared, and someone slapped you in the back of the head. What do you do?"

"Uh…" Takeshi offered. "Run like hell?"

"Regroup," Hideaki nodded. "Without your team, your odds of completing your mission would drop drastically: you would better serve the Village by retreating and taking another in its stead." Tamako gave a small verbal assent.

"Good answers," Yui said with real approval. "That's what I did. _But_ ," she said, clicking her tongue, "that rule didn't apply when the Yellow Flash was involved. I didn't know that at the time."

Tamako felt the shift in tone.

"So, I retreated to a forward base, kinda like the one we went to near Amegakure," Yui said. Tamako blinked, something rattling in her mind, before being drawn back into her sensei's story. "Well, who am I kidding, I ran my ass off. Wasn't much of a retreat. There were about a dozen shinobi there: I didn't know any of them. Only one of them was a jounin. I think she'd been a platoon leader, at least until earlier that day. She asked me what had happened."

Yui sighed.

"I got maybe five words out before people started dying."

In the cold silence Yui had filled the hotel with, Tamako realized what had happened in a moment of harsh clarity.

"He used you as bait," she said, and Hideaki glanced at her. "Right?"

"Clever girl," Yui said, her teeth revealed by a bitter grin. "Bait might not be the right word, but you're pretty close. He took out my team, stuck his jutsu on me, and then waited for me to run off and get help."

"And when you were around enough targets, he came back." Hideaki finished the thought. "But I don't understand. How did you escape a second time?"

Yui's hand curled into a fist. "The same way I did the first time. He killed everyone in the base and vanished again." She blew out a frustrated breath. "I didn't see him that time either. I was too young, and he was too fast: only the jounin even had an opportunity to fight back, and her jutsu missed. Before I knew it, everyone in that base was dead."

The genin sat in mutual quiet, absorbing what their sensei had told them. Tamako understood now, or at least she thought she did, just a little more about being a shinobi: about being someone who could have everyone die around them without warning, without closure. Amegakure, the deserts of Wind, and now this. She glanced at her teammates.

"After that, I wasn't dumb enough to meet back up with more of my comrades," Yui said. She cut through the silence with casual ease. "I stayed away from other Stone-nin, and I waited for him to come and finish me off as well." She shrugged. "But three days later, I was still alive: at that point, I figured he either didn't care enough to kill me, or was just the real patient type. Maybe both." She laced her fingers behind her head. "So I kept it up. Even avoided a recon team, the same kind I'd been a part of, because I didn't want to risk getting close to them. I did drop a note for them though, telling them what had happened. Two days after that, a chunin ended up tracking me down. He kept his distance, but he told me this sort of thing had happened before, and the village had a way of dealing with it."

"What was it?" Takeshi asked, his eyes glued to their sensei. Yui wrinkled her nose.

"Quarantine, basically," she said, and Hideaki nodded, looking like he'd had a suspicion confirmed. "If you got marked by the Yellow Flash, you weren't good for anything. You couldn't work with a team, and it was worthless to send you off on any mission of importance, even by yourself. It would just be throwing ninja away. So I got led off to a base far away from the frontlines." She laughed. "Well, 'base.' A bunch of crappy houses, really. It might have been a town before the war, but all the buildings were shit. I think one of them had been hit by a Water Dragon or something."

She continued. Tamako was entranced, along with her team, as Yui's story leaked out. "There were a bunch of saps there, all the same as me; unlucky bastards who'd been marked and left alive, either on purpose or rarely by accident. The village put us all up in this crappy wannabe town, figuring we were all dead men walking anyway. If the Yellow Flash wanted, he'd kill us before we knew it. The Tsuchikage probably figured it was just as well we'd all be in the same place."

Tamako felt a twinge of anger. "That's not…" she started to say, before reconsidering. "Didn't that make you angry?"

Yui cocked her head. "A little, at the time. But after a couple weeks…" She tapped her lip. "When you're living at the whim of an enemy, among a bunch of people going through the exact same thing, you start to see things differently." She smiled. "Everyone dealt with it differently. Some people just pretended like nothing was wrong; others went all out, figured that any second the Yellow Flash was gonna pop up and put them out of their misery, and they were damn determined to try and take him with them. There was this one guy, ah, what was his name… Tari? Something short like that. He walked around every day with explosive tags plastered all over his chest. Figured that if the Flash went after him, he'd have a decent chance of taking him out as collateral." Tamako's sensei snorted. "Not the brightest thing I'd ever heard of, but I guess it got him through the day."

"What did you do, sensei?" Hideaki asked.

"I trained," Yui said. "I messed around with fuinjutsu; I set booby traps all over the shitty house I'd been given in-between trying to spruce it up, cause it was nice to think that if that bastard ever popped up he might get his ankle broken or something. Didn't think it would really work, but it was a nice thought." Yui chuckled, and Tamako found herself echoing with a little laugh of her own.

"I don't get it though," Takeshi said. "You've still got the seal, way after the Yondaime Hokage died. Did no one figure out how to remove it? I feel like that'd be better than sticking all you guys in, like…" His face twisted a little, looking or the proper word. "A ghetto."

"Oh, it's easy enough to remove," Yui said, and Takeshi frowned. "You just gotta cut off the marked bit."

"The skin?" Takeshi asked.

"More than that," Yui said, sounding like she was enjoying herself more than she should have been. "You wouldn't have learned this kinda stuff in the academy because it's technical crap, but the Yellow Flash really was a genius." She tapped the nape of her neck. "His technique could be applied in a couple different ways. The normal method was just a jutsu formula that summoned him to its location instantly. The way he marked people with it was a bit different. This is technically a juinjutsu: a curse seal, if you wanna be dramatic. It's hostile in more ways than one, and it digs in real deep. You couldn't just remove it by cutting off the marked skin. It melds with the immediate chakra system."

She snapped her fingers. "Picture it like a pimple. The gross stuff, up top, is just an illusion. Dead skin and puss and crap. In this case, what looks like ink. The real problem is down beneath the skin, with bacteria clogging up your pores and gross stuff like that. You could pop or scrape that dead skin all you want, but that bacteria's not going away without more extensive treatment." Yui her nails over one of her fingers. "When it comes to the Yondaime's juinjutsu, that usually meant taking off a limb, or a real big chunk of flesh. If you didn't dig deep enough, the mark would reappear."

Tamako winced, but Hideaki sat up a bit straighter, his eyes narrowing.

"I see," he said. "Then, since it was placed on the nape of your neck, it couldn't be removed safely."

"Not without taking out two of my vertebrae," Yui confirmed. Tamako involuntarily pictured her sensei's spine emerging from her neck and felt something in her gut flop over. "Now, I'm pretty badass, but even I need my spine."

"So… what? You just lived in that base till he died?" Takeshi asked.

"Yeah. A year and some," Yui said. "It was weird, obviously; being so bored, but still knowing that the bastard could come back and finish the job before I knew what was happening. Tough to put that tension to words."

"Wow." Takeshi was struck dumb, leaning back and running his hand over his face. "That's messed up."

"Yeah, well, Namikaze was a messed up guy," Yui said. "You satisfied?"

"Not really," Takeshi admitted. "Kinda feel bad for asking now."

"Ah, it's okay buddy," Yui said with a grin. "I never get to tell that story. It may not be exciting, but it's interesting, right?'

Takeshi nodded, and Tamako echoed the motion. Despite the horrifying implications of what her sensei had just told her, Tamako nonetheless felt the release of some tension that she didn't even know she'd been harboring.

It had seemed, she realized, like Yui had known everything there was to know about her. No, Yui _had_ known everything important about her, while Tamako had been completely in the dark on her sensei. Now, with some of Yui's past realized, the exchange felt more even: for the first time in a long time, Tamako felt like a student who could eventually become Yui Tono's peer, instead of a girl trapped by a duty she was still trying to understand.

"Thank you," she said after a moment of hesitation. Yui heard the sincerity in her voice, and pulled a face.

"Enough of that crap," she said with a snort. "C'mon. There's gotta be something fun to do around here." She slipped off her chair, ambling towards one of the thick wooden cabinets adorning the walls. "Maybe in here."

* * *

"So you never wanted a regular-type life, huh?"

The woman across the table, younger, far less grizzled, leaned back with a disgusted look. "The fuck is that? Barbeque and board games?"

The man interrogating her took a moment, then nodded, a sardonic smile creeping down from the top of his forehead and eventually stretching his lips. "Yeah."

Tamako chuckled, taking a bite out of the orange she held lightly in her left hand. It was sweet, the sweetest thing she'd had in days, and the light from the television gleamed palely off the skin she hadn't yet peeled from it.

"This regular-type, like your life?" the younger woman drawled. Tamako leaned forward, anticipating the other shinobi's response. The two men were seated at a table in a cafe, late in the night: they'd finally confronted each other after a long game of cat and mouse, and it was thrilling to see them play off each other. Even though the younger woman, Nori, was a missing-nin, Tamako felt herself rooting for her to win the verbal altercation.

"My life?" The older man leaned back, his nondescript hitai-ate dramatically catching the light as the many wrinkles on his face were thrown into harsh contrast. "No, my life's a disaster."

As the man spoke about his family falling apart over the years, the camera mercilessly focused on his face. Tamako wondered how much actors like him actually knew about shinobi. His hitai-ate purposefully didn't resemble any of the major Hidden Villages; unless films were propaganda pieces, most producers didn't want to risk alienating foreign audiences or governments by portraying their shinobi as bad guys, or at least as unsympathetic ones. Her father had told her that the Daimyo of the Land of Wind had restricted foreign entertainment for a time about a decade ago, but that the embargo had recently ended. Now, out of the five major powers, the Land of Lightning was the only nation that had laws about foreign entertainment like films or novels.

To him, people like her were probably just an interesting enigma. Something to make money off of at best, and trouble at worst. It wasn't incredibly uncommon for directors to hire shinobi as stunt doubles for more action-packed films, or so Tamako had been told. She'd never met anyone personally who'd done such work, though she thought it could be very interesting. What if one day she was approached and asked to play an implacable metal woman, striding through solid walls and stunning people with her impenetrable skin? The idea of using her Kekkei Genkai so frivolously made her laugh, but the idea was still sort of appealing.

She'd zoned out for a couple minute, and the conversation on-screen had moved on. Tamako had unconsciously been following the dialogue: now, she shook her head and devoted her attention back to the screen. Behind her, up on the couch, Takeshi shifted.

"You know, we're sitting here," the man, Kano, muttered, then sighed. "You and I, like a couple of regular people. You do what you do, and I do what I gotta do." He took another deep breath, leaning in: Nori slouched back. "And now that we've been face to face, if I'm there and I gotta put you down, I won't like it. But I'll tell ya…" His face went hard, and Nori's eyes dropped. "If it's between you and some poor bastard whose wife you're gonna make a widow." He laid his hands flat on the table.

"Lady, you're going down."

"Goddamn he's awesome," Takeshi announced. Yui shushed him, her legs drawn up on the couch next to him.

"Quiet," she hissed as Nori made a confident comeback. "This is my second favorite scene in my second favorite movie!"

"I will not hesitate." Nori's voice wafted over hers, every syllable sharp and cold. "Not for a second."

"He should attack her," Hideaki said. "She's alone. This is the perfect-"

" _Shhhh_!"

Hideaki waited until the scene had moved on before speaking up again. "I don't understand why no one in the cafe cared about their hitai-ates," he said, and Yui scowled. "Hers was even defaced." Tamako twisted her head to look over her shoulder, interested in her team's response.

"It's a movie, man," Takeshi grumbled, but Yui just shrugged.

"He doesn't want anyone getting hurt," she said. "It's admirable. He can take her at a later time, in a safer place, where innocents won't get caught up in it." Her eyes flicked to Hideaki, and Tamako noted with interest their catlike slyness. "It's a good lesson. Completing the mission as quickly as possible isn't always to your advantage. Sometimes it pays to wait."

Hideaki frowned, before nodding. Tamako looked back to the screen, rolling the words over in her head. It made sense, but she could see situations where her sensei's advice could cause problems. But that was the point of the 'sometimes,' wasn't it? No advice could be universal.

Unbidden, the gutted city that dominated her dreams forced itself into the cracks of her brain once more. Whatever had happened there, Tamako was sure the inhabitants hadn't had time to get out of the way. Nothing that was so destroyed that utterly was prepared for it beforehand. If someone had been more patient, would Amegakure still be around?

"And besides, Hideaki," Takeshi said. "A lot of people don't care about hitai-ate. They just kinda ignore them. Haven't you noticed?"

"They don't ignore them," Tamako said, shaking her head as her teammate glanced at her. "They notice them for a second, and then they decide it's none of their business. Haven't _you_ noticed how people in this town look at us? They're just doing their best to keep out of our way."

"That's true," Hideaki agreed. "In fact-"

He blinked, closing his mouth mid-sentence.

"What?" Takeshi asked. Hideaki tilted his head.

"That man. At the front desk," he said slowly.

"Yeah?" Yui asked, leaning forward with clear interest.

Hideaki stood up. "He said something. I don't remember exactly what, but Tamako just made me remember. If he's still on his shift… I'll be right back." He swiftly made his way to the door and slipped out of the room without ceremony, leaving behind his baffled team.

"Dude's weird," Takeshi said before the silence could settle. A woman screamed on the TV.

"He's just quiet," Tamako said. "But he definitely just figured out _something_." She huffed. "Wish he'd told us what though."

"He'll be back soon enough," Yui said. "Maybe with something useful. Let's just enjoy the movie."

Sure enough, Hideaki did return about ten minutes later. Tamako and Yui looked up in interest as the door opened, while Takeshi remained entranced by the brutal fistfight on the television. The special effects were impressive, though Tamako had been amused by one shinobi ripping a chunk of concrete out of the ground with the bottom of their foot and using it as a missile. It was a cool but impractical trick.

"So?" Yui asked as Hideaki closed the door. "Figure anything out?"

"There are other shinobi in the city," Hideaki said, and Tamako sat up, suddenly at attention. "They showed up about three weeks ago. The man at the front desk met one of them while they were looking for housing."

"Where from?" Yui asked. Hideaki shook his head.

"He didn't know, but he gave me a sketch of one of their hitai-ates." Hideaki reached into one of his back pockets, pulling out a napkin. Some ink had leaked through to the other side, but as Hideaki unfolded it, it became clear the symbol on it was still legible. It was a very simple design: just four vertical lines, one alongside the other.

Yui sat back, scratching the back of her neck. It took a moment longer for Tamako to recognize the symbol than her sensei, but when she did, she had a similar reaction.

Yui sighed.

"Shinobi from the Land of Rain."


End file.
